Insights

Better than Boolean: Unlock Accuracy, Efficiency, and New Revenue with Haloo’s Common Law Search

Julie MacDonell

Oct 30, 2024

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Common law trademark searches present a significant challenge for trademark professionals advising clients on brand protection. Unlike registered marks, these trademarks gain protection through use alone—often appearing only on websites, social media, or in local business listings, without being recorded in official databases.

The stakes are high. Missing just one potential conflict can derail a client’s entire brand strategy and expose them to liability. Yet conducting thorough common law trademark searches remains extremely difficult.

In today’s digital age, searches must go far beyond traditional sources like business registries and trade directories. You now need to cover the vast expanse of the internet, which includes:

  • Over 1.5 billion websites

  • Billions of daily social media posts

  • Millions of product listings on e-commerce platforms

  • Countless blogs, forums, and online publications

The sheer volume of data makes truly comprehensive searching nearly impossible. While outsourcing to trademark search providers for human analyst services is considered the gold standard, it is slow, costly, and often unreliable.

If you've ordered a common law trademark search from a provider, you know the drill: email details to an analyst, pay a premium, and wait. A thorough search can take days or weeks - time you don't always have. A single-country search can easily cost $800 or more, with multi-jurisdictional searches driving that cost up exponentially.

How often have you reviewed a trademark search report and thought, "The ordering of results seems off"? Or worse, worried that something vital was missed altogether? You're not alone.

Even when paying top dollar, human analysts face constraints:

  • They're always racing the clock to meet tight client deadlines

  • High quotas mean they're churning out reports, sacrificing depth for speed

  • They're trained in Boolean searching and may know basic trademark concepts, but they're not legal professionals

  • They're human - prone to mistakes, especially when dealing with mountains of data

  • The internet evolves daily, and traditional search methods can’t keep pace

As a trademark professional, doing these searches yourself is no better. You’ll spend hours brainstorming keywords, crafting complex queries, compiling results, screenshotting and annotating them. This consumes valuable billable hours and raises costs for your clients, with no guarantee you’ll catch more than a search provider.

Your clients pay for your trademark expertise, not your internet research skills. That’s where Haloo comes in—bridging the gap between manual searches and your expert legal analysis.

Take Control: Generate Your Own Reports with Haloo

Haloo's advanced algorithms do the heavy lifting, finding all relevant results in real-time. You then step in to compile the report, leveraging your expertise where it matters most. Customize rankings, analyze conflicts, screenshot and annotate findings directly in the platform. This approach saves time and adds value to your billable hours. The result? Your clients get thorough, AI-powered research combined with your expert legal analysis in one efficient package.

Here's why you're going to love it:

  • It's fast. Like, blink-and-it's-done fast. Reports appear now, not next week when it's too late.

  • It's scary accurate. Catches things humans miss. Things Boolean searches definitely miss.

  • You're the boss. You rank the results. Because you know what matters to your client.

  • No more junk. Say goodbye to useless social media hits clogging up your results.

  • It digs deep. Websites, social media, Amazon listings, news and media, Full domain info, WHOIS data - the works. If it's out there, Haloo finds it.

But here's where it gets really good:

  • The important stuff floats to the top instantly. The results you actually care about? They're right there waiting for you.

  • See something you want to point out to your client? Snap it. Screenshot and annotate websites on the fly. No more clunky workarounds.

  • We've categorized the entire internet. Yeah, you read that right. The. Entire. Internet.

  • Filter like you've always dreamed of. Remember when you wished you could filter the internet? Well, wish granted.

This is how you tackle 1.5 billion websites and come out on top. Haloo doesn't just search - it organizes, prioritizes, and hands you the reins.

But Haloo goes even further. We've embedded additional insights crucial for legal analysis, including deep word meanings. When it comes to understanding the full scope and implications of a trademark, here's what sets Haloo's dictionary integration apart:

Haloo integrates comprehensive language resources to enhance your trademark analysis:

  • Full Merriam-Webster: Get complete dictionary information, including all definitions, usage notes, and examples.

  • Etymology: Trace word origins and evolution to evaluate distinctiveness and potential genericness.

  • Acronym Dictionary: Understand abbreviations and initialisms that could impact trademark uniqueness or cause confusion.

  • Wikipedia Insights: Access contextual information and common usage patterns.

  • Urban Dictionary: Stay informed about contemporary slang and evolving language use.

With these diverse sources, Haloo empowers you to build stronger arguments for trademark distinctiveness, defend against genericism claims more effectively, and understand the full spectrum of how your mark might be perceived.

But here's the real game-changer: By bringing comprehensive common law searches in-house with Haloo, you can transform a loss leader into a profit center for your firm. Instead of merely passing along the cost of traditional human analyst searches, you're now positioned to offer a premium service. This service delivers high-value analysis that's quicker turnaround, cheaper, and more accurate than traditional reports.

Haloo isn't just another tech solution - it's born from real-world experience. Our founder scaled a 3-person, one-lawyer firm to compete with Tier 1 practice groups, becoming one of the top 12 in filing volume. How? By leveraging technology.

Haloo's mission is to be disruptively simple in pricing while empowering practitioners to generate substantial revenue. We've designed our tech to be a powerful tool in your arsenal, helping you work smarter, not harder.

Welcome to the future of comprehensive trademark searching. It's here, it's Haloo, and it's about to make your life a whole lot easier - and more profitable.