Alt Legal, the cloud-based trademark docketing software company headquartered in New York City, has acquired the §2(d) Citation Watch business owned by Canadian company Towergate Software.
With this acquisition, customers of Towergate’s §2(d) Citation Watch will transition to Alt Legal’s existing §2(d) Trademark Watch service.
To be clear, Alt Legal is not acquiring Towergate, which provides a variety of tools relating to searching, reporting and visualization of IP data. Rather, it is acquiring the customers who subscribed to Towergate’s §2(d) Citation Watch. Towergate will discontinue its service and the service’s customers will now be ported over to Alt Legal’s service.
“We’re thrilled to partner with an early innovator that also prides itself on servicing the IP community and look forward to providing Alt Legal’s §2(d) Trademark Watch to Towergate’s customers,” Alt Legal founder and CEO Nehal Madhani said. “We are confident that Towergate’s customers will be pleased with the additional value provided by our §2(d) Trademark Watch and our hands-on approach to ensuring customer success.”
Tev Kofsky, Towergate’s president, said, “We’re excited to transition our §2(d) Citation Watch law firm customers to Alt Legal’s §2(d) Trademark Watch service. With this seamless transition, our customers will benefit from additional functionality provided by Alt Legal, whom we are well aligned with as a customer-centric and innovation-focused company.”
Madhani said Alt Legal will work with the former Towergate customers on a case-by-case basic to determine their pricing going forward. Alt Legal’s pricing is based on the size of a customer’s portfolio.
Informing Trademark Owners
Both of these services target a problem related to Section 2(d) of the Lanham Act, under which a trademark application will be denied if there is a likelihood of confusion with another trademark that is already registered.
When the USPTO denies an application for this reason, the applicant is notified, but the owner of the existing trademark is not and the denial is not published in a way that makes it readily available to the public.
This could be important to a trademark owner because the applicant can attempt to overcome the denial and register the potentially infringing trademark. It is also possible that the applicant is already using the trademark in a commercial manner, in which case the owner would want to take action to stop the use.
Alt Legal’s §2(d) Trademark Watch automatically identifies §2(d) office actions and sends a daily email warning subscribers when a denial implicates one of the subscriber’s docketed trademarks or existing trademark applications.
The Towergate product did something similar, but on a weekly basis.
In May 2021, Alt Legal announced a partnership with Clarivate Plc to integrate Clarivate’s CompuMark international trademark data into the Alt Legal platform, giving Alt Legal customers access to CompuMark and its 186 trademark databases, covering all jurisdictions in the world.
In 2019, it acquired the trademark docketing software business of MarkTend and transitioned its customers to Alt Legal.
Related: On LawNext Podcast, The Unlikely Story of How An Insolvency Lawyer Built A Global Trademarks Company.
