--- title: "I gave my own brand the advice I give clients, and I gave it too late" url: "https://lawyermagazine.co/insight/i-gave-my-own-brand-the-advice-i-give-clients-and-i-gave-it-too-late/" author: "Daria Turanska" published: "2026-09-25" updated: "2026-09-25" --- # I gave my own brand the advice I give clients, and I gave it too late I picked a name for my business before running a proper clearance search. I am a contract lawyer. I have told other people not to do exactly that. The office action from the United States Patent and Trademark Office arrived anyway, refusing registration under Section 2(d), likelihood of confusion with an already registered mark owned by a large legal information company. Nothing about the refusal was unreasonable. That is the part worth sitting with. The examiner was not being difficult and the cited mark was not obscure. The conflict was findable by anyone who looked, and the reason nobody looked is that I had already fallen for the name and the search had become a formality I intended to complete later. I want to set out what that taught me, because law practice is full of people who advise on this competently all day and then make the same decision I made about their own firm names, practice group brands and product launches. The first thing is that the sequence matters more than the search. A clearance search performed after the logo, the domain, the sign-up flow and the first few hundred pages of content carry the name is not really a search. It is a hope, with a procedure attached. By that point the only finding you are emotionally prepared to accept is a clean one, and a Section 2(d) analysis rewards pessimism rather than hope. The question is never whether the marks are identical. It is whether a consumer encountering both in the relevant market would be confused, which is a far wider net and takes in similarities of sound, appearance, meaning and commercial impression, plus the relatedness of the goods and services. The second thing is that the register is not the whole risk picture, and people who are new to this tend to run the search too narrowly. An identical-mark search in the trademark database will miss the ones that matter. Phonetic equivalents, marks that differ by a single letter, marks in an adjacent class serving the same customer, common law users with no registration at all. A refusal is the cheap version of this problem. The expensive version is a letter from a party who never registered but can demonstrate prior use. The third thing, and the one I would press hardest on, is that a Section 2(d) refusal is not the end of the road, but every route forward has a real cost. You can argue against the refusal, which means paying for the argument and waiting. You can negotiate a consent agreement with the owner of the cited mark, which means approaching a company that has just been shown to have a claim against you. You can amend the identification of goods and services to move further from the cited registration, which narrows what your own mark covers. Or you can rebrand, which means the money you spent building recognition converts into the cost of abandoning it. None of those is a defeat. All of them are expensive in a way the original search would not have been. The fourth is about how this feels from the client's side, which I now understand in a way I did not before. When you are advising, a refusal is a procedural event with options. When it is your mark, it lands as a verdict on a decision you were emotionally committed to, and the temptation is to fight it for reasons that have nothing to do with the strength of your position. I caught myself constructing arguments about the distinctiveness of my mark that I would have dismantled in ten seconds for a client. That is not a legal failure. It is an ordinary human one, and the reason clients need advisers is precisely that they cannot see their own naming decisions clearly. There is a broader lesson for anyone building something inside a legal business. I run FasterDraft, a legal document template platform operating across the US, UK and Australian markets, and I have noticed that the parts of my own operation I treat least rigorously are the ones closest to my expertise. I audit the templates obsessively because they are the product and a mistake in them is visible. The trademark, the terms on my own site, the contractor agreements, all of that got the treatment busy professionals give their own affairs, which is to say it waited. If I were designing a practice policy from this, it would have one rule in it. The clearance search happens before anyone is allowed to like the name. Run it on a shortlist, in writing, before the shortlist narrows. Whoever is going to fall in love with the winner should not be the person deciding whether the search result is acceptable. I would also stop describing clearance as a risk-management step, because that framing invites people to weigh it against other risks and defer it. It is a design constraint, like a budget. Names that fail it were never available, and finding out early costs a fraction of finding out late. The cheapest legal advice I ever received was the advice I had already given to somebody else and declined to take. --- Daria Turanska is a Legal Manager at [FasterDraft](https://fasterdraft.com).