[Music] good morning today my guest is Mari Ribeiro head of IP at Elnaggar and Partners um Mari is an IP lawyer a speaker uh a business coach and uh we're very happy to have you here today thank you very much for coming thank you so much I've been really looking forward to being on your platform so thank you for the invitation thank you very much Marie I just give a a very quick introduction about you and then I will start asking you to introduce yourself in a proper way uh you were born and raised in the US um you uh are uh registered as a lawyer in Florida and you moved in Dubai in the UAE last year welcome to the UAE thank you thank you very much for coming and please I would like that you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background how did you start with the law and why did you choose IP and why um did you move to the UA sure so uh I never really intended to be a lawyer uh once I graduated University I graduated from the school of music so I uh was really into contracts and that kind of um Arena Within the Music Industry and I was really looking for a job and that was in the middle of the um housing crisis in the United States so of course I was applying for a work nobody was hiring at the moment and I looked at my mom and I was like what am I supposed to do now now that I have this degree what am I supposed to do and she said you're gonna be a lawyer and she was just very matter of fact about it and so since I wasn't looking for work she told me just go to a semester to law school and see how you like it if you don't like it you can drop out and you can figure out what else you want to do I was totally tricked because I'm very studious I love to study I love to analyze the law and those kinds of things and so I did really well in law school um so I became a lawyer because my mom just pretty much told me that's what I was going to be doing um and then once I started working um I was actually a litigation attorney so I was actually uh defending um insurance companies in court so I got nice experience for a few years years in court um and I quickly found out that while I was good at litigation I didn't enjoy litigation so I learned that I was a lover not a fighter and um once I got laid off from there um there was just no more cases I started looking for a work in the transactional world putting together deals um making business happen and I stepped into the world of real estate law so I became a real estate uh corporate attorney and um afterwards I also got uh laid off there and I was like okay well clearly I'm not supposed to be working for someone else let me take a look at how I can maybe establish my own firm um and I really learned that job security is not something that I can allow an employer to provide to me I really saw that because I was laid off two times if I wanted job security I would have to create it myself so that's how I became my own boss and opening up my own law firm uh and I was a corporate lawyer so I was mainly doing business transactions and one of my uh favorite clients uh they came to me they were in the logistics and um software industry they came to me and they said we need a trademark and I was like oh I'll try to figure out how that works and so I pretty much learned on my feet because a client asked me for a trademark and once I found out wow this is actually really interesting more so than putting together contracts I just started offering it to my clients and essent eventually I ended up getting rid of contracts uh and just only focusing on trademark law because there was just so much more of a story behind the brand as opposed to the story behind the contract so um because I had the freedom to choose who I wanted to work with and the area of law that I wanted to work with I just followed my interest and I started becoming an expert in trademark law wow um I just noticed one thing out out of your speech not so many lawyers would be very open to say that they got laid off twice and it was their motivation to start up their they're from usually most of the conversations that I have if someone is telling me their story about how they started their own Law Firm the the own private practice is turning out of being very successful and having tons of clients and being able to be very valuable in the law firm where they work and then they decide I want to go on my own not that someone got laid off twice and then they decided um I don't want to get into this again I'm going to start up my own firm that's very confident of you I like it yeah I would say that I didn't choose to be an entrepreneur the entrepreneurial life chose me and unfortunately I had to um have rejected from law firms twice to really understand okay God really intends for me not to be an employee they intend for me you know he intends for me to be a business owner who just happens to offer a legal services wow that's that's really nice but did you see any uh did you get any message from God as well since you started your own low firm in transactions and then you switched to trademark maybe that is why the first two jobs didn't work out yeah I really do think that everything happens for a reason um and the thing is is that I I thought I had a a hunch that I would end up working for myself I just wasn't sure exactly how and the circumstances around it and to be quite honest I don't come from a family of lawyers I don't come from a family of Entre entrepreneurs so I really did have to learn a lot of this on my feet and I have been blessed that the way that I learn things is through experience so I had to go through um negative quote unquote negative experience at the time in order for me to really see oh wow okay this is the direction that is really being laid out for me very very interesting uh I actually totally agree with you that negative experiences especially in in in our career path shape up a little bit how strong we are and teach us a lot and that this is one of the things that I totally agree with and uh it happened to me as well and that's where that's why I am where I am right now um I want you to explain to us a little bit what is IP uh from your own perspective and what exactly do you do in the IP sphere what are your services what's your expertise sure so intellectual property is essentially protecting your creative works and there's three different types there's copyright right which protects um with your authorship so think about music and books and movies um podcasts like yours uh website content as well that would all fall under the umbrella of copyright law and then we have patents which I am not a patent lawyer or a patent expert um but that is more about inventions and creating new ways of doing things that would be under patent law and then we have uh my expertise which is trademark law and that is really making sure that nobody can copy or steal your brand and your brand is anything that your customers and your clients use to recognize your products or your service that you're selling so the trademark world really make sure that the face of your business can be legally owned by you as the business owner and uh what kind of risks businesses um face if they don't register or they don't protect their brand I I know for for example um when I registered my my my brand as a Naran partners for my firm I'm protecting the name and agar in general is a is a family name so and it's a huge family and is this word is used in many companies because it is repeated as a family name in many countries in in the Middle East so and aor parts for me I have to protect it because of the very high similarity of the name so I I can imagine the many lawyers with this family name so me registering it is very important for me not be associated with someone else or not to be mixed up with someone else what other examples you might think of that everybody should be protecting the brand for so you really hit the nail on the head I mean essentially trademarking is to make sure that there's not going to be any customer confusion in the marketplace so how is really the audience supposed to recognize that this is your Law Firm if they don't see your brand and so what tends to happen is is if you don't have the trademark Mark registered meaning that you don't legally own it because essentially you don't have any legal rights to it unless the government gives it to you um you're essentially allowing a huge potential risk in that anyone can pretend to be you and when someone is pretending to be you they can steer your customers and clients to buy from them as opposed to buying from you and at the end of the day how is a client or customer supposed to pick you over someone else the only only thing that they use is The Branding the colors the fonts the Styles the designs those things are unique identifiers so it's as if someone were to copy your face how am I supposed to know who's the real El nagad if I don't actually if I'm using your face to identify you and say yeah I want to work with this Law Firm but if somebody's copying your face I'm G to be super confused and that actually tends to happen a lot more in the marketplace than we tend to want to believe especially with business owners who maybe they don't anticipate how big their brand is going to be known and recognized in the marketplace they tend to undersell themselves and say oh no that's that's not going to happen and it absolutely happens even within the legal Fields I have seen where lawyers try to uh copy other lawyers logo and taglines and those kinds of source identifiers because it's catchy it's Unique it's what what stands out and when you are marketing your products and your services the main thing that is super important is that you stand out that's the only way that people are going to choose you over someone else if you look like everybody else why would they pick you can you please tell me or explain why is it important to register the trademarks locally and internationally because for example I'll go back to my example I'm I'm basically practice practicing here and most of my clients are here in the UA but in the future I have plans to practice uh my business in other countries like expanding in the region here in the GCC region maybe even going to Europe and so on why is it so important that I register it locally and if I have to make a plan from the beginning to protect my brand worldwide as as well what could be the risks involved if I don't do that sure so one of the biggest misconceptions is that there's this Global protections as it relates to trademark I'm going to pop this bubble right now you do not have worldwide protection there's no such thing as a blanket protection all over the world what needs to happen is that you need to register in each of those territories and so for example if you have a business here in the UAE and you have plans to expand worldwide well first we need to ask what does worldwide mean are you really going to be in like these tiny countries where you're going to be operating the answer is probably no so we need to figure out what countries are you actually going to be expanding into and then the next question is when you say you're expanding are you actually going to be physically located there because one of the interesting things about trademarks is you don't actually have to be physically located in that country in order to have trademark protections what you do have to do is that your brand is being exposed to that country so Marketing in that brand is sufficient and now when you think about the internet there's no limitations so you don't physically have to have an office there you don't physically have to make any sales there in order for you to qualify for trademark registrations in a new country so while there's no blanket protections worldwide it's all about where are you actually going to be marketing your brand where are people going to be exposed to your brand that you would not want them to say hey that's really catchy and I want to copy it um I was actually learning about um I was reading about some of the cases about some strategies in which you can actually have Protections in other um territories and really you're kind of doing it as like hunkering down where I'm not actually selling anything here yet but I plan to so trademark is all about first come first serve and that's why the registration process is super important because even though you may not necessarily be operating there you have plans to operate there but if you don't get in the trademark line somebody else could come in before you and then you're going to have to Rebrand in that country and then you can't leverage your reputation that you've built for example here in the UAE and expand it into Europe or in America for example so you're saying that I can start registering my trademark in one of the European countries or maybe in the US before actually having a an office there or even a license there I'm just providing or even planning to start providing my services or selling my products to these countries so I step in register my brand can I do it on my personal name or can I do it with the company name is there a possibility to do both yeah so actually um I'll handle both of those questions first when you are going to be entering into a new territory um there are usually two ways to apply for your trademark regist you can tell the Trademark Office hey I'm already using this brand and uh my rights are based on actual use meaning I'm already marketing there my brand is already um exposed to this territory the other way is called an intent to use meaning hey trademark office I'm not using the brand right now in this territory but I plan to within the next short period of time um in the United States they want you to start using it within six months of the intent to use being accepted so it gives business owners leeway to say yeah I want to go ahead and get in the trademark line even though I'm not necessarily operating or um exposing my trademark just yet but I have plans to do so um as it relates to who's going to be the owner of the application of that trademark registration this is where you want to kind of think like a litigator um and so if you are owning the trademark application and the trademark rights in your personal name the same way that you own anything else in your personal name you're exposing yourself to personal liability and so what I usually recommend to my clients is let's have the business own the trademark and this is where we can have a little bit of fun as well so we're limiting the liability in case that you are ever accused of trademark infringement stealing somebody else's brand or if you have to bring a litigation uh case against someone else stealing your brand you want to do it in your corporate capacity and that way you have a little bit more control control over limiting how much exposure liability you have you can also add another layer of liability protection by having a holding company being the one that is using um I'm sorry that is holding the trademark rights in the application so for example if you're very successful and you have lots of assets within that company you want to then separate your other IP assets by having a holding company which is a non-operating company to be the legal owner of that trademark application trademark registration that way again if your operating company is um defending a lawsuit there's very little chance that they're going to be able to touch any of the IP assets because you have it in a totally separate company as a holding company and it's kind of a very valuable thing when you when you are in business for 10 20 years and you build a good name good reputation the brand is a value so when you have it in the holding company you basically are building the the the the value of that holding company just for the IP from one side the operation of the business have a separate price and this is one of the significant things that we saw in in many transactions as well let me ask you this question in regards to When shall a company or entrepreneur start considering registering the brand because in the beginning most of a startups most of the entrepreneurs do not really want to spend too much when would you recommend them to start registering the trademark so the main thing that I learned in law school is to answer most of these questions with it depends so when you are a business owner my question is always going to be when are you married to the brand when is it going to be your worst nightmare that you have to Rebrand your entire face of your business for some businesses that's before they've even created their LLC their C corporation or even started marketing investing in social media marketing business cards website development there's some businesses where they've put so much love attention and energy in creating a brand identity that it hasn't even been into the market yet but they would be devastated if they had to Rebrand many business owners really create a lot of uh value in the uniqueness and distinguishability when they are creating their brand identity so for some businesses that may be before they're even launching before they've even started operating for other businesses it might be 10 years down the line I'll tell you a quick story I had a company that they are in the catering business and they were in the business for 10 years before they came to me the reason they came to me is because they saw a huge billboard with their exact same logo and brand and this company did not have a trademark and they wanted to stop this other company their competitor from using their exact same brand and so what we had to do is we had to register at first so for them it wasn't valuable until they saw their competitor and that becomes a lot harder for you to claim your trademark rights and to stop your competitor from copying or stealing your brand so it's always going to depend on the business owner when is it going to be a nightmare for you to have to Rebrand your business and that's what trademarking prevents is that you don't have to Rebrand yeah so the question is always going to be when is your brand valuable to you the moment it becomes valuable to you as a business owner the moment that you do not want to Rebrand it that's the moment that trademarking is appropriate what would you advise if um anybody notice or see whether online or offline their trademark or something similar to it to their trademark being used by another person or another company for whatever purpose what is the first thing that they should do so the beautiful thing about trademark is that they don't have to copy your exact brand trademark actually protects against similar confusing Brands the question is always going to be are your customers and clients going to be confused when they see a similar brand so what I'm going to advise is one do you already have the trademark registered because your options are a little bit limited if you don't so if you do have your trademark registered you are granted exclusive rights to be the only only person in your industry to have rights to use that brand if you start seeing someone using a brand that's similar to yours or exactly like yours you are actually obligated to enforce your trademark rights if you don't enforce your rights then you could potentially lose your rights so the first thing is always going to be do you have it registered if you do then you need to a notify the infringer or the claimed infringer and letting them know hey you're using my trademark you're stepping on my trademark toes if you don't stop I'm going to have to bring you to court and usually that's done with a letter a cease assist letter it's a formal notice it basically puts them on notice that hey you're using my brand without my permission and therefore violating my trademark rights I'm going to give you a few days to discontinue use that means change your website change your business cards change your business name do whatever you need to do but you have to stop using my brand and if they failed to do that then you would probably have to go into litigation and start asking the court to intervene to start enforcing your rights yeah one of the common things that happen is that we see companies coming from Europe thinking that I registered my brand in Europe or I registered my brand in Italy or in Switzerland and that's where I started and now I have a branch or another subsidiary here in the UAE I don't really need to redo the work what do you say to that misconception so if you are registered let's say in Italy or in Spain or in France and then you decide to bring your brand into the UAE sorry you have no trademark rights unless you go into the UAE trademark office and request those trademarks to be granted so again there's no worldwide protection just because you're protected in your country and then you leave your country and you start marketing in another country you don't AO automatically have your trademark rights that's why it's super important to have a trademark lawyer who has access to global trademark registrations to help you to see where do I need to actually register my brand yeah I'm going to repeat some questions that I hear from some of the entrepreneurs sometimes I hear like I have a trade name I established the company and it says trade name and I have the words uh mentioned I don't need to register the brand itself because the name is very clear so they register the company they have the trade name on the license but they don't go ahead and register the brand is it the same does it really have any protection the answer is no there's no protections there um just because you register your company name with an official government does not Grant you any sort of trademark rights another big misconception with entrepreneurs is that I own the domain name if I own the Dooms the Nets the a SI and I pay for the domain then I automatically have trademark rights again another misconception domain names are basically an address for you to live virtually online as long as you're paying the subscription to have that domain name then you have the PO Box you have your address otherwise unless you actually get a trademark registered approved by the Trademark Office you don't have any type of trademark rights have you seen any examples like this someone who have been working in the business doing it for many years and suddenly realize that someone else owned their brand and and how how did I don't know what was the reaction what was the outcome of this conflict in the end I had a social media management company that hired me after a few years of being in business and the wonderful thing about working with an expert like myself is that before we do a trademark application which can be denied we do a trademark search which allows me to look at the trademark landscape who else is out there in the business world in the internet world and who else is using a brand that's similar to yours the reason that a trademark search is super important before you even do an application is because we want to make sure of two things one How likely are you going to get approved for your trademark application and two if you do register your trademark or try to apply for your trademark are you going to be inviting any kind of lawsuits because someone else has been using it before you so with this client she was using her brand for a few years we do the trademark search and we see that there's somebody else out there who predates her who has been using this brand and so what we did she insisted on moving forward anyway with the trademark registration against my recommendation I'm just the adviser you are the driver I'm the passenger and I have the map I tell you what's likely to happen but you make thec decision so we did the application and lo and behold like I told her she got a cease and assist lost the money for the trademark application lost the trademark registration and of course had to spend thousands of dollars to Rebrand her entire business so that's why it's super important to understand as a business owner simply ask yourself do I want to Rebrand and when we're talking about rebranding we're talking about spending money on creating a new logo creating a new tagline creating a new website creating new business cards creating new product packaging I mean the list can go on and on and on so it really comes down to how much money am I willing to invest not to mention the money that you put in towards your marketing your ad spend that also needs to be changed and you have to start from scratch because now you have to train your customers and your clients hey I'm no longer this business anymore we've rebranded and you can try to sell it as something something exciting but at the end of the day you're probably going to be losing time and customer loyalty and you have to start all over because now you have to train your customers and clients to start associating this new product or service with this new brand and the cost absolutely you know I I I had a case like a few years ago with a with a similar scenario and they were not even trying to steal the brand name or the logo they choose to use the same color code for the the the product it was an oil and gas company who and a lubricant company and they use the same color code that was very um very famous to be used by this huge company just to build this similarity because the client loyalty actually goes to the brand and the color code that was registered in this case to together with the brand name of the big company um have have allowed them to write a season assist letter and were they had a very good legal standing to stop the other smaller company from building this similarity and being a kind of stealing their or leveraging on their brand yeah so remember trademarks is all about a source identifier it's an ID it's your face so it's not only your business name it's not not only your logo it's not only your tagline it can be colors so if you get a pretty blue box with a white bow you are pretty sure that it's coming from Tiffany and Company there's no other brand that's allowed to use that Tiffany blue because it really does identify where that product is coming from so similar situation with the oil and gas company that you were just explaining especially when the infringer knows that that this color code is recognized that's why they're copying it that's why they're stealing it and although there's no intention required to be held liable for trademark infringement a lot of people still do it intentionally but there's not a requirement which means that if you do it by accident you can still be held liable but most the times it's not by accident enough of the negative talk now we need to go in to something really positive because we scared the audience enough of the risks and what could happen if they uh step on the IP toes of someone else or they get their brand and and in risk of being infringed what are the benefits that you might say that businesses uh should consider uh and register their brands for sure so um I would agree Switching gears is a good idea yes um so the first thing kind of going along with the risk is peace of mind you don't have to worry that you are going to have your brand copied or stolen and if someone does do it you actually know that you have legal recourse against them the other thing is that you're going to be having peace of mind to know that you won't be accused of having been trademark infringed upon somebody else's brand the other thing that I think uh is really beneficial for entrepreneurs and business owners to understand we like money and so with a trade trademark when you are going to sell your business or if you're looking for ways to create passive income the best thing that you can do is to Leverage The reputation that you've created around your trademark so again trademark gives you the exclusive rights to use your brand within an industry when you have those exclusive rights you get to control the messaging behind that brand and when you are really successful in that messaging you get to give other people permission to license that trademark and start expanding into other territories for example Disney the Disney brand they first started off in animation creating movies but now they have cruises they have theme parks they have movies they have uh toys they have clothing they have jewelry I mean you name it Disney is in that industry the only way that they were able to expand into other Industries and leverage their brand is by licensing their brand giving other people permission to start using the brand and monetizing it and Disney just has to sit back and collect royalty checks so that's one way that business owners can really leverage their trademark and then the other one is when they are going to sell their business um they can pretty much put any sort of price tag on The Branding so when they are transferring the assets to a new owner to a new buyer um that they can pretty much put whatever price tag they want on it and they're really going to get to leverage all of those years of creating and managing and controlling the Brand's reputation to a willing buyer so it's really passive income for all the work that you've done without really having to create a whole another business strategy um but just by leveraging your trademark rights this session was very informative and very helpful I learned from it and I think a lot of entrepreneurs should listen to your advises and to consider registering their trade uh trademark thank you so much for being with us and for the knowledge you share thank you so much for having me I really enjoy educating entrepreneurs because an educated entrepreneur is an empowered entrepreneur so thanks again for sharing your platform thank you this is your do from Monday legal see you next week and register your brand