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Is trademark search done by an attorney/lawyer?

Senior Trademark Attorney

Trademark searches can be performed by anyone. The registers are publicly accessible, and anyone can look through them to find similarities between marks. That said, thorough clearance checks that go beyond just identical word-for-word matches and assess the risk factor of new applications are performed by trademark attorneys.

Assessing whether a phonetically similar mark in a related class poses a real opposition risk requires legal judgment about similarity thresholds, the goods and services comparison, and how the relevant IP office is likely to assess the conflict—all of which are matters of legal expertise. That analysis is what a professional trademark search provides, beyond what a basic database query returns.

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