Your brand may be used across websites, marketplaces, social media, company names, domain names and official registers. Identifying potentially harmful activity early can give you more options to protect your intellectual property, customers and reputation.
Keltie helps businesses monitor activity affecting their brands, assess potential risks and decide when action may be appropriate. Our attorneys combine monitoring with strategic intellectual property advice, taking account of your rights, commercial priorities and the nature of the activity identified.
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Brand monitoring is the process of identifying and monitoring third-party activity that may affect a brand or its intellectual property rights.
Potential problematic activity can take many forms. It may involve a new trade mark application, a similar company or domain name, an unauthorised seller, a misleading website, an impersonation account or the unauthorised use of protected material.
Monitoring can help rights holders identify potentially problematic activity and determine whether it requires further investigation or action.
Registering intellectual property rights is an important step in protecting a brand, but registration does not prevent other parties from seeking to register trade marks or other rights or using similar names, signs, content or online identities.
Without ongoing monitoring, potentially harmful activity may not be identified until it has already caused confusion, diverted customers or affected the reputation and distinctiveness of the brand.
Early identification gives a business more time to understand the issue, preserve relevant evidence and consider a proportionate response.
An effective monitoring strategy should reflect the intellectual property a business owns and the environments in which its brand operates.
Depending on the organisation, monitoring may cover:
Not every reference to a brand amounts to infringement, and not every issue requires the same response. Legal and commercial context are important when deciding whether action is appropriate.
Monitoring is most useful when the information identified can be properly assessed.
A large volume of alerts without meaningful review can make it difficult for a business to distinguish significant risks from irrelevant activity. Effective monitoring focuses on identifying issues that warrant attention, rather than simply collecting mentions of a name or brand.
Keltie’s attorneys can help assess the nature of the activity, the rights involved and the potential effect on your organisation. This assessment helps align monitoring and any subsequent action with your wider intellectual property and commercial strategy.
The appropriate scope of a monitoring programme will depend on factors including:
Keltie works with clients to develop focused monitoring strategies that reflect these priorities. Where potentially harmful activity is identified, our attorneys can advise on the available options and whether further investigation or enforcement is appropriate.
Effective brand monitoring requires more than identifying potentially problematic activity. It requires an understanding of the intellectual property rights involved, the commercial significance of the issue and the options available in response.
Keltie combines focused monitoring with legal assessment. Our attorneys help clients distinguish significant risks from lower-priority activity, investigate potential issues and determine whether action is justified.
Whether you need to monitor a particular trade mark, strengthen protection for a growing brand or develop a broader monitoring strategy across multiple markets and online channels, we can help you establish an approach proportionate to your risks and commercial priorities.
Contact Keltie to discuss your brand protection priorities and how a tailored monitoring strategy could help you identify and respond to potential risks.
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The attorneys in our Trade Mark Group are among the leading brand protection experts in the UK and Europe. Through our associate network, we coordinate brand protection all over the world. The Group comprises multi-lingual European and UK trade mark attorneys with backgrounds in law, engineering and business. Their expertise extends through the full lifecycle, from searching and filing through to opposition and litigation, including enforcement and appeal. The Group also has vast experience in online enforcement.
Before you start using a trade mark, it is good practice to conduct a search to check that the trade mark is free to use. Conducting this type of search can be challenging because there are so many trade marks in use across many different fields of commerce. This makes it difficult for people without trade mark qualifications to navigate other brand-owners’ rights, and avoid or manage potential conflict.
How to file a trade mark The trade mark filing process can be relatively straightforward. In theory, all an applicant needs to do is access the relevant trade mark website, enter the word they wish to create a mark for, add the relevant goods and services to apply to the mark and pay the fee.
What is trade mark protection? Trade mark protection is a means of securing a monopoly right in a word, logo, shape, colour or sound that acts as an identifier of origin, allowing consumers to immediately determine the source of the goods or services offered under that particular trade mark or brand.
Your trade mark can represent years of investment, reputation-building and customer trust. Whether you're an established brand maintaining hard-won recognition or a growing business building your reputation in new markets, your mark is central to your identity and commercial value. Obtaining trade mark registration alone provides a foundation—but not full protection. Every day, new applications are filed that could conflict with your rights, weaken your brand's distinctiveness, dilute the reputation you're building or confuse your customers. Without active monitoring, these threats can go unnoticed until significant damage is done—undermining the goodwill you've worked to establish and making enforcement far more costly and complex.
Keltie's attorneys have an unusual wealth of expertise and experience in design rights. We help clients protect their designs, exploit their rights and mitigate risks.
If you are launching a new product there is a risk that it will infringe third party design rights. You can reduce the likelihood of costly conflict down the line, or at least be better informed of potential risk, by conducting a design search and clearance assessment before product launch. To do this, we search for relevant earlier rights - both registered and unregistered designs - help you assess the risk these pose to you, and guide you in any action that you might take to reduce and mitigate risk.
To protect your design with a registered right, a formal application must be made to the appropriate IP office. Obtaining a design registration is relatively quick (a matter of weeks or months in the EU and UK), which can be very useful for creators because it means rights and therefore protection can be granted swiftly.
As the owner of a design right, you are able to take action against another party if they market a product that is too visually similar to yours, without your permission. If their product is identical to your design, or if it differs in some ways but the impression the consumer takes from their product matches your design, you may be able to take action.
Counterfeit products, copycat websites, impersonation accounts and other forms of online brand misuse can damage revenue, reputation and customer trust. Because harmful activity can spread rapidly across multiple platforms and territories, manual searches alone are rarely enough. Keltie combines AI-powered detection technology and scalable enforcement with the strategic oversight of experienced trade mark attorneys. We help clients identify potentially harmful activity, prioritise the issues that matter and take proportionate action to protect their brands. Technology provides the reach; our attorneys provide the judgement.
Your brand may be used across websites, marketplaces, social media, company names, domain names and official registers. Identifying potentially harmful activity early can give you more options to protect your intellectual property, customers and reputation.
A domain name provides a platform for visibility of a brand in an online space. It is a destination address for the web traffic generated around a brand name. However, simply put, a domain is a word, and a word can be trade marked. Often, people secure a domain name first in their process of creating a new product or service. Whilst an online presence is a key part of launching a new brand, it is a mistake to think that because you own a domain name, you will be able to secure a matching trade mark. The process should work the other way around - where a domain name becomes an additional asset secured following the clearance and registration of a trade mark.
The attorneys at Keltie join forces with Customs Authorities, Border Forces and Online Enforcement Agencies to tackle infringement and counterfeiting head-on. Counterfeit goods pose a significant threat to the reputation of brands and unsuspecting consumers through a wide range of sectors.
People who work in this area
Jason has over 10 years’ experience in the IP profession. He regularly advises clients on the ownership, registration, enforceability and exploitation of IP rights.
Charlotte joined Keltie in 2008, after graduating from the University of Birmingham with a law degree, qualifying as a Chartered Trade Mark Attorney in 2013 and obtaining the IP Litigation Certificate in 2016. After spending 12 years at Keltie, Charlotte spent four years developing and heading up trade mark practices at London law firms. Charlotte re-joined Keltie in 2023 as Partner of the trade mark practice.
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