Design protection

Your designers spend a lot of time and considerable expense to make your products appealing and individualised so that they generate as much enthusiasm as possible. Ideally, they will even develop a design language that establishes itself as typical for your company's products. You should not leave such an asset unprotected to the piracy scene.

You can obtain design protection for a maximum of 25 years by registering your design with the relevant patent and trade mark office or, in the European Union, already through use, which you must prove in detail in the event of a dispute. It is therefore advisable to always file an application for design protection and register your products as a protected design.

Protection of typographical fonts

You can obtain design protection not only for industrial design products, but also for the typographic appearance of a font as protection for typographic characters (‘font protection’).

From the sketch to the registered design

A protected design that can be enforced against third parties must be unique in comparison to the already known shapes. This means that the external appearance of a protected product must be clearly distinguishable from the previously existing design of comparable products. We support you as early as the design phase with research into existing designs and register the finished design for design protection on your behalf. To do this, we will prepare the product images that will define the subsequent design protection in close consultation with you.

Design protection domestic and abroad

Design protection is granted at the national, regional and international level. For design protection abroad, cross-border regional and international design protection systems are available, for example a European EU design or an international design registration.

If you need protection for your design outside your home country, we will work with you to assess your territorial IP needs and develop a filing strategy for foreign countries that is also suitable for you from a budget perspective. We will then take care of registering your design with the relevant office and coordinate any national foreign proceedings. We can either carry out the corresponding registration procedures for you directly or we can work with foreign colleagues from our global network and coordinate the foreign procedures in close consultation with you.

Management of your IP rights after registration

After registering a protected design, we will monitor the due dates for the renewal of your registered design and remind you of upcoming deadlines for fee payments. We can also take over the payment processing for renewal fees in Germany and abroad. You can also use our IP management service to facilitate the administration of your design protection portfolio.

As your external IP department, we not only manage your IP portfolio but also relieve you of other related tasks, so that you can focus on your core business.