AI Touted For One-Stop-Shop Trademark Work

An article in Bloomberg Law suggests AI could allow trademark attorneys to add an additional service that would make them more of a one-stop-shop, particularly for small businesses that don’t already have trademarks or are looking to augment what they have. In addition to determining availability for what the company is already considering, new advanced platforms, like ChatGPT, could be used to actually generate the options.

A demonstration of how it could work comes from a Cozen O’Connor trademark attorney, as she shares the results of an AI search for potential marks for a cannabis business. She also has an undergraduate marketing degree, and it may be that she was particularly savvy about how she phrased the question, but the results are impressive. The time may be coming, she says, when clients will turn to attorneys as a “one-stop-shop” for their trademark issues, ie., to suggest marks as well as to see if current candidates are already spoken for.

The Bloomberg article also quotes a Perkins Coie attorney, who explains why, when there is a trademark infringement question and the issue is determining whether there’s a likelihood that consumers would be confused, it would probably require – at least for now – the application of a human sensibility. “Trademark law,” he says, “is not immediately amenable to humans leaving the process entirely.”