Intellectual Property & Marketing

At TLo, we provide guidance on all aspects of trademark management. We assess the availability and likelihood of registration of new trademarks, manage trademark portfolios, secure domain-name registrations, license marks, and police infringement. Every day, Fortune 500 companies, regional business leaders, and local entrepreneurs rely on us for cutting edge analysis and practical advice on their trademarks and brand-imaging strategies.

TLo also provides copyright counseling and advice, including pre-publication review of copyrightable materials, copyright registration, and work-made-for-hire and licensing agreement in a wide range of media—from books, newspapers, and magazines to software and commercial advertisements.

TLo lawyers are accomplished and experienced trademark and copyright litigators. In court, we will protect your company’s ideas and brand, or challenge a competitor’s efforts to profit from your mark, misappropriate your copyrighted work, or infringe your protected rights.

We also can initiate legal proceedings to combat improper on-line use of your business name, web address, or trademarks against so-called “cyber squatters,” and to prevent your customers from being wrongfully diverted. TLo regularly litigates and arbitrates domain name disputes before World Intellectual Property Organization and National Arbitration Forum.

Digital commerce is the lifeblood of many businesses. State advertising laws, however, often seem inconsistent, leaving companies concerned about online advertising and marketing. To help their e-businesses thrive, TLo provides a unique series of Web-focused legal services, including creating and assessing click-through agreements, analyzing children’s advertising issues, navigating social networking, counseling on FTC blogger guidelines, creating mobile marketing agreements and providing Web site reviews and recommendations. Our lawyers help you stay at the forefront of online legal issues, so that you can stay ahead of the competition.

Our legal professionals routinely review advertising and marketing materials for regulatory compliance and recommend and prepare privacy and data-related disclosures in creative materials for campaigns in all types of traditional and emerging media, including print, POS, television and radio broadcast, digital, GPS-enabled, geofenced, filtered, SMS, and in-app, and social media platforms of all sizes.

In addition, Thomas & LoCicero attorneys regularly advise clients on other privacy issues in advertising and marketing materials, whether under statutory commercial misappropriation prohibitions, unfair deceptive trade practices regulations, contractual theories based on existing website terms, or common law theories of invasion of privacy based on rights of publicity, disclosure of private facts or intrusion via electronic surveillance.

In conjunction with promotions, contests, and sweepstakes, as well as podcasts, webcasts, vlogs, conferences and other cooperative events, our lawyers routinely prepare privacy-related documents for participants, collaborators, and guests including publicity releases and consents, to outline any rights to use name, likeness, interview content or details, or other information in marketing.

At TLo, we help advertisers run successful national and international sweepstakes and contests. The laws governing sweepstakes and contests vary dramatically between states, but we know how to navigate these confusing legal waters. We can vet your existing sweepstakes or contest rules or create new official rules to help you maximize participation and minimize risk. We also draft vendor agreements, site licenses, sponsorship agreements, co-promotion agreements, and other related contracts.

TLo’s involvement doesn’t necessarily end once the campaign is launched; we frequently work with our clients to address promotion-related developments and other contingencies that can arise during the campaign. We prepare affidavits of eligibility, liability releases, publicity releases, and other legal documents and required government filings needed as you bring your promotion to a successful conclusion.

Our sweepstakes and contest experience includes serving as the lead law firm for many national loyalty programs, fundraising campaigns, user-generated content promotions, and front and back-end promotions in industries including media, travel, education, non-profits, retail, manufacturing, and more.

Thomas & LoCicero attorneys advise clients on the various privacy and other legal implications of traditional and emerging-technology-related marketing and security initiatives, such as: Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled behavioral marketing, on-platform and cross-platform user tracking, web-scraping or data harvesting activities, audio or video surveillance, geo-fenced mobile campaigns, data combination and enhancement, integration of online and offline customer data sets for targeted marketing or security screening, facial recognition or other body-recognition or biometric technologies, passive data collection via closed-circuit television (CCTV) and similar repurposed technologies, user-engagement and premium or marketing content delivery via wireless device-enabled filters, and event-based marketing using on-site self-service photo kiosks with wi-fi and social media channel access.

Of course, we also provide guidance on the appropriate level of security needed for data collected or associated with these campaigns, including the relevant need for segregation, advanced classification, encryption, access controls, etc., depending on the privacy impact assessment of the data.

Depending upon the circumstances, litigation is not always necessarily the best option for resolving an intellectual property dispute.  At TLo, our legal team considers a variety of strategies to achieve the optimum results for our clients.  Mediation and arbitration are often sound alternatives.

Gregg Thomas is a certified federal and state court mediator who combines wide-ranging litigation experience with realistic assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of parties' claims and defenses. Gregg recognizes that the parties – not the mediator – settle cases. But he also believes that as a mediator he can provide the parties with an impartial and realistic perspective on their case, and a chance to put litigation behind them. 

From more than 30 years as a civil and commercial litigator, Gregg's approach to mediation, in part, is derived from having clerked for two federal district court judges.
As Gregg has noted, "In almost every case, the parties stand to gain by compromising. If they continue to litigate, they are more likely to lose time, money, and peace of mind."

Defamation law, invasion of privacy, and constitutional claims are the areas in which Gregg is best known, but he also has extensive real-world experience in many other fields, including deceptive and unfair trade practices, contracts, business torts, non-competition agreements, Section 1983 actions, RICO, and trade secrets.

In addition, Thomas & LoCicero  frequently arbitrates cases before the American Arbitration Association (AAA), the National Arbitration Forum (NAF) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). In arbitration, we seek to achieve the optimal result in the most efficient, economically feasible manner.