“We believe that lawyers should be empowered to do work with higher added value,” says Jan Buza, Head of Business Development at Trama. The legal-tech startup specializing in trademark registration and intellectual property protection has focused heavily on optimizing the work of its own lawyers, and after two years and over 8,000 registered trademarks, it came to a decision to offer the same benefits to a new clientele – other lawyers and law firms. In this interview, Jan Buza talks about the evolution of Trama and how he envisions a digital product that could help such a specific niche.
Please introduce Trama to us. What does it mean when we say Trama is a “legal-tech startup”? What are you doing differently from a trademark lawyer or a law firm?
I would say there are two main aspects to that. The first one is process automation. Normally, you’d need probably several hours of human time to do the search, drafting and filing of the trademark. Thanks to the tools we’ve developed, we can do it faster, which directly translates into the amount of money we’ll charge you for the service without compromising the quality.
The second one is data. Because we are doing this at scale, we can provide you with better service because, even if you have a very experienced lawyer who files dozens of trademarks each year, we file thousands, so we can come up with a better recommendations related to classes and goods & services within them, especially in the case of more complex applications.
What kind of recommendations?
About which items are most likely to get you into trouble with the trademark office, what is the chance you’ll get oppositions during the process, that sort of thing. Basically, all these seemingly minor things that at the end of the day shape the success of trademark registration.
You said you’re filing thousands of trademarks each year, yet Trama has been established only in 2020. How hard was it to get to this number?
It was quite challenging. Generally, if you are selling something online as a service, customers need to trust you. And with legal services, it’s even more important. Customers want to see reviews, they want to see your track record, they want to know who is in the team. When you are starting, you don’t have anything, only a small team. So this was quite tough for us.
Nowadays, we are getting more and more requests through word of mouth, so it seems the awareness of our brand is growing and that we are trustworthy enough, which is great.
And now that you’ve “made it” and you have the numbers, is there a milestone you are particularly proud of?
Probably winning larger accounts. We have customers that registered 20 or 30 trademarks with us. Recently, several larger eCommerce sites have also reached out to us. The fact that we are getting noticed by major industry players is something that I’m personally very happy about.
But this is just the start. Currently, we are mostly in the registration service business, but we would like to build a complex technology platform on top of that. Our long-term goal is not only to become the largest trademark registration provider in the world, but also the largest trademark portfolio manager and the largest intellectual property law firm marketplace.
Can you elaborate on the technology platform?
The majority of clients we are servicing now are end customers who need the trademark for their own purposes, not law firms. The thing is, law firms have some special requirements on how the application should be drafted and what the process should look like. So with our new platform, we want to make it easier for them to file with us.
Now, if you’re a law firm, you wouldn’t probably use Trama for filing in your domestic jurisdiction, because that way you wouldn’t have your name as a representative on the application. So the second step for us is to build an automated filing service, where you’ll be able to draft the application and then file it with us with just one click, which as I said is a major time saver.
The next step after that would be the trademark management platform, where you’ll be able to manage large trademark portfolios, which we are creating with law firms and also large enterprises in mind.
Why these two groups? Why would they need something as specific as a trademark management platform?
Some law firms manage trademark applications and trademarks for their clients and currently, most of them store the data in an Excel file or an old-school database, which is hard to maintain. If you have it on our platform, you can see all deadlines, the communication with the intellectual property office, you get notified about status changes of the application, etc. So again, for them it means keeping track of fewer things manually, it’s all automated.
And enterprises, well, some companies own hundreds of trademarks and they need not only to file them, but also to maintain them, which means different things in different jurisdictions. For example, they need to monitor whether a new trademark entering the market is infringing on their existing trademark.
Are there any other plans for the future that you’d like to mention?
Yes. I had already mentioned the one-click filing. We believe that lawyers should be empowered to do work with higher added value, which is talking to clients, doing the search and thinking about how to carve the trademark strategy, not clicking the forms on the intellectual property office’s website. So you draft the application once, get it approved by the client, select countries and file it, and you don’t have to fill out one form in the EU, another one in the US, etc.
Considering the changes that you are bringing, do you feel the industry is ready for innovation?
Some industries are faster than others, but yeah, I think the development that we see is that manual work is getting automated. I see it in the automation of the litigation process and what large companies like Facebook or Amazon are doing by automating their forms where you can notify them about infringement. I feel like the whole litigation sector is going towards automation, especially since the brands that are selling online are facing hundreds of infringements in different parts of the world. It’s just impossible for lawyers to create so many legal letters. So I believe we will see more automation initiatives in this part of the market.
So the private companies are pushing the legal sector, instead of governments?
Yes. For example with trademarks, what we are seeing now is that the waiting times for trademark registration in various offices are getting longer simply because of the number of applications they are receiving.
I think the private sector is a bit faster when it comes to adjusting. Facebook or Amazon didn’t automate the whole thing because they wanted to be progressive. They automated it because they were just getting too many requests. So yeah, I feel that the companies are able to react to changing the market faster, but eventually, the governments are engaging as well.
