Please take a moment to read this news carefully as there is something at the end worth knowing about
Over the coming weeks, you are going to start seeing a lot more from The Trademark Helpline.
Not necessarily because we are doing more (although we are investing heavily in improving our services), but because we have realised that we haven’t always been very good at showing you everything we already do.
For many of our clients, the most visible parts of our relationship have historically been the application, registration and renewal of their trademarks; but being your trademark representative involves much more than filing an application.
A lot happens behind the scenes.
To give you some idea of what happens behind the scenes, in the last six months alone our systems have recorded more than 21,000 reviews of client records, almost 4,600 substantive case and client notes, nearly 1,000 logged calls, 125 meetings and hundreds of client-work tasks.
And even those figures don’t tell the whole story. They exclude a significant amount of activity including WhatsApp conversations, work within our newer systems, documents, filings and some official correspondence.
On top of all of that, we carry out regular monitoring checks across the trademarks we represent, allocating around 30 minutes per active account each month to monitoring alone.
This is exactly why we are changing the way we communicate with you.
A large amount of work has historically happened without you ever seeing it, because unless something required your attention, we simply dealt with it.
We aren’t going to stop doing that. We are simply going to become much better at showing you what has been done on your behalf.
Where we act as your representative, correspondence relating to your trademarks comes through us. We review it, distinguish genuine official communications from scams and misleading approaches, filter out the things you don’t need to worry about, and contact you when something genuinely requires your attention.
Where we cannot reach you by phone, email, WhatsApp or SMS and action is still required, we will also send correspondence by post. That creates an additional cost for us, but it is sometimes necessary to make sure an important deadline or issue is not missed.
We monitor what is happening around your trademarks, help identify potential conflicts and threats, keep an eye on important deadlines and changes, and are here when an issue needs to be dealt with.
The principle has always been quite simple: You run your business. We help look after your trademarks.
The demands placed on trademark representatives have increased considerably over the years. Rather than simply responding by dropping a substantial price increase on thousands of existing clients, we have continued investing in the people, systems and technology that allow us to manage that responsibility efficiently.
Now we want to make that work much more visible and much more useful to you.
The first change you will see is having visibility on our trademark monitoring.
We are beginning to introduce new fortnightly UK monitoring reports for our clients. Please note, you will be able to change the frequency, but we do not advise less frequently than monthly.
Your first report will give you the wider picture of the trademarks we represent for you on the UK trademark register, and the results we have identified and analysed. After that, we will show you what has changed every 14 days.
We will send you details of the trademark monitoring we do on your behalf including potential threats and explanations of why something has been flagged. You then decide whether you want us to review it, whether you consider it irrelevant, or if you would simply like to keep an eye on it.
This is only the beginning – we are also rolling out a new client portal.
This will increasingly become the central place for your intellectual property and business information, allowing you to see your UK and international trademarks together alongside your UK companies, rather than information being scattered across different registers, countries and correspondence.
We will continue developing this over time.
We are also working on new tools designed to make the information we already have access to far more useful to you.
That includes Watchlists, allowing you to follow businesses and organisations that matter to you such as competitors, clients, prospects, suppliers or simply companies and people of interest, and identify activity that could represent either a threat or an opportunity for you.
We also want to use what we know about your business to proactively highlight opportunities to save money, strengthen protection and avoid unnecessary expenditure.
In other words, we don’t want to only contact you when there is A) something needed from you or B) when a renewal falls due, as this can often seem like we’re just selling new services to you.
We want to become better at showing you what we are doing, what we are seeing, and why it matters to your business.
Membership is optional. Saving money isn’t.
Every business owner has a responsibility to make sure their business is getting a good deal and taking advantage of the opportunities available to it.
After 23 years in business, I have yet to meet a client earning more than £50,000 personally or generating that level of profit where I couldn’t identify ways of making them at least £2,000 per year better off.
I believe in this so strongly that I am giving the membership side of what we do its own identity: TMH Advice & Legal.
If you aren’t already benefiting from referrals, earning rewards, making use of legitimate tax rebates or reliefs available from HMRC, reducing the cost of investing, or using AI to save your business time and money, there is probably something worth looking at.
In fact, I would go as far as this: if you are earning or generating more than £60,000 per year and, after reviewing your circumstances, I cannot identify a realistic way of making you at least £1,800 per year better off, I will give you £100.
It isn’t about selling everybody another service. It is about making sure that, where we can genuinely help one of our clients save money, make money or avoid unnecessary cost, we tell them.
There is one important principle that won’t change: the amount of official correspondence that arrives with us is going up year on year and usually has deadlines for action.
This needs managing as it is something that genuinely requires attention; our job as your representative is to make sure it doesn’t simply get missed.
That responsibility sits with us, and we take it seriously.
What happens next? You don’t need to do anything today.
We will shortly begin sending invitations to set up your new client portal and activating the new monitoring reports.
We are onboarding approximately 100 clients per day so we can make sure the transition is managed properly, and our team can support people as they come onto the new system.
If you’d particularly like to get access sooner, just email us and we’ll move you forward.
Your first monitoring report will follow shortly. It will give you a much better idea of what has been happening around your trademarks.
Thank you, as always, for trusting us to look after them.
