The International Trademark Metasearch queries various trademark office registries, including those of the US, Canada, the CTM, Madrid and Japan.  It’s been available on this site for no charge since 2001.  I view it as an ’80/0′ solution, offerring 80% of the utility of an international knock-out search at 0 of the cost.

However, many trademark offices routinely upgrade their interfaces (necessitating new code at our end), and many countries are putting their registries online (requiring all new coding).  It is a daunting challenge for this firm to maintain this valuable tool alone.

I propose the following.  We will upload the existing code to a site such as SourceForge.  We will devise an appropriate open license.  Hopefully people will step forward and undertake to maintain the interface to one trademark office.

Contact me marty at schwimmerlegal d0t c0m if you have thoughts on this project.

NASCAR driver Jimmie Johnson was fined $10,000 for obscuring a bottle of Coke product POWERADE with a sign for LOWE’S, his primary sponsor.  Nascar had ordered drivers, who are independent contractors, some of whom have contracts with rival beverage companies, to stop knocking down the bottles of POWERADE that were being placed on their cars after a race.  More here.

I could sure go for a nice cold POWERADE right about now.  You know, POWERADE provides the rapid rehydration that trademark lawyers need.  Tastes great too.

The INTA Listserv has a thread going this morning on set fee billing.  While I understand the movement toward set fee billing my stock line is that set fee billing is a gamble between the outside lawyer and the client, and if either side wins big, it isn’t healthy for the trusted counsel relationship.

Set fees potentially address at least two concerns.  The first is the Holy Grail  budgeting accurately.   However you can’t control two major determinants of the size of your legal outlay, namely (1) governments and (2) Other People.

 The second concern is that hourly-based billing contains a disincentive against efficiency in that lawyers get compensated more, the longer they take to do something.  However set fees replace it with an incentive to do things on the cheap.  As one INTA-poster noted, with set fees, the work gets pushed down to the lower and not necessarily better, biller.  Alternately, strict set fee billing can punish the diligent lawyer.

The meta-problem to be solved here ought to be, IMHO, not budgeting accuracy, or using leverage to reduce the outside firm’s profitability, but to instead get better value for the legal dollar spent.  Hard to measure, hard to achieve.

How law firms can improve efficiency is too large a topic for me to blither on about on a Monday morning.  I will only make the uninsightful comment that competition and downward price-pressure (such as requesting set fees),  ought to motivate firms to work on efficiencies.  However getting there is harder than it seems: my co-Blawg Channeler Dennis Kennedy has a piece on e-billing today that suggests that investing in technology such as e-billing may not always increase efficiency.

More on this later.