Professional trademark services & management of
international trademark portfolios in East Asia.

Regulatory Compliance of Product Names

Regulatory Compliance of Trademarks
The registration, import and distribution of a product will only be granted if its particulars, including its name, are in compliance with local product safety legislation. When standing alone or in context with your product presentation, product names must not be misleading, exaggerating or create false expectations of consumers as to the product category, functions and effects.

The grant of registration of your trademarks by local patent & trademark offices only confirms their registrability regarding local trademark law, but it does not imply compliance with other laws regulating product safety (such as food, cosmetics, devices, health care products, drugs, etc.). Therefore, registering a trademark without foresight of regulatory compliance may lead you to a dead-end road involving problems with customs and brand-damaging product recalls ordered by local regulatory authorities.

Pharma-in-Use and much more
Our expertise in regulatory compliance enables us to evaluate the compliance of product names with the legislation of your target markets. We conduct regulatory compliance checks of trademark candidates during the screening and search projects. Beside the usually conducted "Pharma in Use" searches, we carry out scans in local pharmaceutical registries taking all possible transliterations into local scripts (Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean...) into account. We estimate the risk of product names being rejected for registration by local regulatory authorities due supra-category relevance as for example between pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, food, pesticides, poisons, etc.