Traditional trademark clearance is slow, expensive, and inconsistent. The conventional approach relies on manual searches by junior associates working through registry databases, producing reports that vary in quality depending on who conducts the search and how much time pressure they are under. For businesses launching new brands, products, or services, this creates a bottleneck: clearance delays can hold up product launches, marketing campaigns, and go-to-market timelines.
At pitch.law, we have rebuilt the clearance process from the ground up using our own IP lifecycle platform. The result is a clearance process that is faster, more thorough, and more consistent than what is available through traditional legal channels. Our clearance engine operates as a structured pipeline: intake, search coordination across millions of trademark registrations, assessment of absolute grounds for refusal in hundreds of languages, analysis of relative grounds for refusal, and a structured opinion with risk classification. Every clearance follows the same methodology, with no variability from staff rotation or time pressure.
Our AI-powered clearance engine performs three layers of analysis simultaneously. The first layer is identical mark detection: searching for exact matches across all relevant registries and classes. This is the most straightforward check and the one that identifies the highest-risk conflicts.
The second layer is similarity analysis across three dimensions: visual similarity (how the marks look), phonetic similarity (how they sound when spoken in relevant languages), and conceptual similarity (what meaning they convey). Traditional clearance searches often miss phonetic conflicts because they rely on text-based searching; our engine analyses pronunciation patterns across multiple language groups to catch conflicts that a visual search alone would miss.
The third layer is absolute grounds screening: assessing whether the proposed mark is descriptive, generic, deceptive, or otherwise unregistrable in the target jurisdictions. This screening operates across hundreds of languages, catching descriptive meanings that might not be obvious to an English-language reviewer but that would be immediately apparent to an examiner at a national trademark office.
The output of our clearance process is not a raw list of potentially conflicting marks. It is a structured clearance opinion that classifies each identified conflict by risk level (high, medium, low), provides a legal assessment of the likelihood of confusion for each significant conflict, and recommends a course of action: proceed, proceed with modifications, proceed with monitoring, or do not proceed. This structured approach allows brand teams and agencies to make informed decisions quickly, without needing to interpret raw search data.
Trademark clearance at pitch.law is offered at a fixed price, not on an hourly basis. This means the cost is known before the engagement begins, regardless of the complexity of the results. For agencies and brand consultants managing multiple naming projects simultaneously, this predictability is a practical advantage over traditional law firm billing models.
Standard clearance searches are typically completed within 24 to 48 hours. Urgent requests can be handled faster by arrangement. Complex multi-class or multi-jurisdiction searches may require additional time for thorough analysis, but the AI-powered search phase itself completes in minutes; the time is in the legal review and opinion drafting.
Our platform covers BOIP (Benelux), EUIPO (EU), WIPO (international), and national registers for 47+ jurisdictions. We can also conduct targeted clearance in specific markets relevant to your commercial strategy. For most European businesses, the standard Benelux + EU + international search provides comprehensive initial coverage.
Yes. Brand development processes typically produce multiple candidate names. We offer batch clearance at reduced per-name pricing, allowing you to screen a shortlist efficiently and focus detailed legal analysis on the strongest candidates. This is particularly valuable for agencies running naming projects with multiple options on the table.
Clearance transitions seamlessly into filing. If the clearance opinion recommends proceeding, we can file the trademark application at EUIPO, BOIP, or via the Madrid System directly from the same platform. The clearance data feeds into the filing process, ensuring that the goods and services specification and jurisdiction selection reflect the risk assessment. EU trademark filing at EUIPO starts at EUR 450 ex-VAT for a single-class application.
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