Patent

A patent allows its owner to exclude other from making, using, selling, importing, or distributing the patented invention. Patents are a driving force behind today’s economy and provide a solid foundation for business success. 

A patent is requested by filing a written patent application with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. An application must contain enough information in it to allow a person of ordinary skill in the art to make and use the invention. The application also includes one or more claims that define what a patent covers or protects.

Once filed, the application enters the patent prosecution phase where it is reviewed by a patent examiner to determine whether or not the invention is patentable. If the patent Examiner believes the invention not to be patentable, the patent examiner will issue an Office action, to which the patent applicant may respond. Patent prosecution is essentially a negotiation process that usually requires one to three rounds of negotiation with the Examiner before the application is either allowed or finally rejected and abandoned. 

Indiano Law Group, LLC is a highly experienced and trusted patent firm that has obtained patents for a wide variety of products, processes, and technology areas.

We offer comprehensive patent law legal services, such as:

• Patent Searches + Patent Legal Opinions (patentability, infringement, and validation)

• Patent Due Diligence

• Patent Application Preparation, Prosecution, and Issuance

• Patent Licensing + Patent License Management

• Patent Contracts + Patent Agreements

• Post Patent Grant Monitoring, Renewals, and Protection

• Patent Litigation

• International Trade Commission (ITC) Proceedings Representation

• U.S. Customs and Borders Patent Protection

What We Can Do For You:

As patent protection can be expensive, the first step is for us to explain the patent process system and associated costs to you to help you determine whether spending money to obtain a patent represents a good investment for you and your business.  For example, a company making barbecue sauce should probably not invest in patent protection but rather take the money that it would spend on patent protection and invest in trademark protection to protect its name, and advertising to promote its product.  On the other hand, patents are incredibly important to medical device manufacturers and such businesses would be well advised to invest in patent protection. 

We help to teach you about both “legal patentability” and “economic patentability,”as understanding both the law and the economics that underlie patent are important to understand in order to make a good decision. 

If you decide to proceed forward with filing an application, we will prepare and file patent applications that protect that your invention and then argue vigorously in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to get the broadest protection that we can for you.

Along the way, we work with you to constantly re-evaluate your position to make sure that it makes sense for you to continue onward with the process.  We never want you to be in a position where you are spending money on us if you don’t believe that the services we provide will help your profitability. 

Viewed another way, if you can profit more by spending your money to advertise your product rather than to obtain a patent for it, we will gladly encourage you to spend your money with your advertising agency rather than with us.

copyright

The attorneys of Indiano Law Group, LLC have significant experience in copyright protection and enforcement for a wide variety of works, such as fine art photography, music, computer software, websites, digital works, catalogs, graphic works, movies, television programs, literary works, architectural works and mask works. 

Examples of the comprehensive copyright services we provide include:

• Copyright + Copyright Legal Opinions

• Copyright Due Diligence

• Copyright Application Preparation, Registration, and Prosecution

• Copyright Licensing and License Management + Copyright Assignment

• Copyright Contracts + Trademark Agreements

• Post Copyright Grant Monitoring, Renewals, and Protection

• Copyright Litigation

What We Can Do For You:

As with trademarks and copyrights, one of the most important things that we can do for you is to help explain the copyright process so that you can make good decisions about how to protect your copyrightable works. 

Some clients decide to engage us to file applications to register their copyrights.  Others choose to register their own copyrights and, in such cases, we are more than happy to help teach our clients how to prepare and file applications to register their copyrights. 

Still, other clients decide that they are best served by just placing a copyright notice on the works they create, and not bothering to register any of their works. 

We will help work with you so that you can determine what makes the most sense for you and, once decided, help you execute your plan. 

Litigation and Dispute resolution

The Indiano Law Group has specialized experience in IP protection and enforcement. The firm offers patent litigation, trademark litigation, copyright litigation and trade secrets litigation to clients in the technology, software, manufacturing, medical device, engineering and mechanical fields.

Technology companies, software firms, medical device manufacturers and electronics manufacturers come to Indiano Law Group, LLC when they are looking for intellectual property litigation firms with the legal expertise and industry sector experience to successfully represent and protect their valuable IP assets.

What We Can Do For You:

Every year we help to resolve a myriad of disputes for our clients.  Our experience teaches us that the first step in dealing with a dispute is to analyze the dispute from a business perspective.  We treat the dispute as a profit center, as we know that our clients’ goals in dealing with the dispute is to fix the problem as cost-effectively as possible.  As with any business issue, we believe that the key to providing good service to our clients is to find a way to resolve the dispute in a manner that makes the most business sense.  If our clients are being sued for infringement, we try to find a way to limit our clients’ losses. 

If our client is the one whose intellectual properties are being infringed, we seek to achieve a dispute resolution that will help our clients make as much money as possible. 

Unlike some, we understand that our clients would rather be spending their time promoting their business interests than dealing with their lawyers and litigation.  To that end, we work to try to resolve the dispute as expeditiously as possible, so that our clients can put the dispute problems behind them, and get on with the business of running their businesses.

Very often, we can resolve disputes even before they get to court.

We try to think out of the box, and recognize that sometimes the “usual way of doing things” just doesn’t get the job done.  Even when we are forced to go to court, we work diligently during the litigation process to resolve our clients’ problems rather than exacerbate them.

Trademark

Brand recognition is one of the most important intellectual property assets a company has to promote and sell its products and services. Probably the most valuable Intellectual Property in the world is the Coca Cola trademark.  Obtaining and protecting trademarks and business names is extremely important because of the goodwill that is symbolized by these intellectual property assets.

The Indiano Law Group has obtained hundreds of registered trademarks on behalf of clients. In addition to obtaining trademark protection for clients, the firm also has extensive experience enforcing trademarks in federal courts. Further, our attorneys have represented clients before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board in trademark cancellation and opposition proceedings.

We have a vast amount of experience searching and clearing trademarks for use, licensing trademarks, performing due diligence reviews and recording registrations with U.S. Customs. We work with a series of long-time foreign associates to obtain foreign trademark protection for our clients. 

In addition to traditional trademarks, our attorneys have protected and defended clients in the field of unfair competition law. Unfair competition law includes trade dress infringement, false advertising, deceptive trade practices, misappropriation, passing off, defamation, right of publicity, parody, counterfeiting and related issues. Our firm also has experience in dealing with issues that arise with the use of trademarks on the Internet such as domain name related issues.

Indiano Law Group, LLC provides a wide array of trademark-related services for its clients, including:

• Trademark Searches + Trademark Legal Opinions

• Trademark Due Diligence

• Trademark Application Preparation, Registration, and Prosecution

• Trademark Licensing + Trademark License Management

• Trademark Contracts + Trademark Agreements

• Post Trademark Grant Monitoring, Renewals, and Protection

• Trademark Litigation

• International Trademark Representation

• Trademark Trial and Appeal Board Proceedings

What We Can Do For You:

The first step for most trademark clients is to develop a good strategy for protecting and defending your trademarks.  To do this, we first work to understand your business, and for you to understand what role trademarks can play in your business.

For some, this role is rather minor. For example, trademarks generally only play a small role in a business that sells expensive, highly customized products to other businesses through a “high touch” sales program.  On the other hand, trademarks play a much greater role in the life of a business that sells consumer products, such as barbecue sauce or candy to consumer type customers. 

Once we understand your business, we then help to design a strategy that makes sense for your business.  For a large consumer products company, this strategy might include a large number of trademark applications filed both here in the U.S. and in commercially important countries throughout the world.  On the other hand, a smaller business such as a restaurant may be well served by just filing a single federal trademark application or, in some cases, just filing a significantly less expense state trademark application.

We can perform trademark searches for you to help you achieve greater peace of mind by knowing that the trademarks you select have only a low risk of infringing someone else’s mark.  If the search comes up clear, we can prepare and file a trademark application for you to help increase your ability to stop those miscreants who would choose to infringe your trademarks.

Later, we can help you protect your trademark rights by cost effectively helping you to stop those who might infringe your trademark rights.

Trade Secret

Indiano Law Group, LLC has a wealth of experience handling the protection and enforcement of valuable and proprietary business information that fuels commercial innovation and competitive advantage in the technical & industrial sectors. The firm’s expertise includes trade secret protection for formulas, plans, pricing, projections, compilations of data, inventions, processes, methodologies, techniques, computer algorithms, designs, tools and compounds.

We offer comprehensive trade secrets law legal services, including:

• Trade Secrets Due Diligence

• Trade Secrets License Agreements

• Trade Secrets Litigation + Enforcement

• Partnership Agreements with Non-Disclosure (Confidentiality), Non-Compete & Non-Solicitation Provisions

• Employment Agreements with Non-Disclosure (Confidentiality), Non-Compete & Non-Solicitation Provisions

• Contractor Agreements with Non-Disclosure (Confidentiality), Non-Compete & Non-Solicitation Provisions

• Legal Business Entity Formation Documentation and Contracts

• Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA or Confidentiality Agreements) and Non-Disclosure Injunctions

• Non-Compete Agreements and Non-Compete Injunctions

• Non-Solicitation Agreements and Non-Solicitation Injunctions

• e-Mail Usage Policy Agreements

• Data Privacy Policy Agreements

• Data Security, Handling, Storage & Disposal Policy Agreements

What We Can Do For You:

The key to protecting your trade secrets is to develop a good trade secret program that identifies your important information and keeps that important information secret and out of the hands of competitors.

We will work with you to provide a good balance between protecting your secrets and not encumbering your business processes by unnecessarily restricting the flow of information.