Portfolio Management
A US clearance opinion stops at the border. Before you file or launch in France or the EU, you need a search run against French, EU and international registers — and an assessment under European likelihood-of-confusion standards, not Section 2(d) case law.
Under French law, a mark must satisfy absolute requirements — distinctiveness, lawfulness, no deceptive character — but it must also not infringe third-party rights. Neither INPI (the French office) nor the EUIPO examines relative grounds ex officio: your application can sail through examination and still be opposed, invalidated, or become the basis of an infringement claim the day you start using it.
That is the point of a clearance search (in French practice, a recherche d’antériorité): determine whether a sign is available — meaning it can be registered and used without exposing you to opposition, cancellation or infringement liability and damages — before you commit filing fees, packaging, and a launch budget to it.
For US counsel, the key structural point is this: your US full search covers USPTO records, state registrations and US common-law use. It tells you nothing about the French register, the EU trademark register, or international registrations designating France or the EU. Availability is assessed territory by territory, and the analysis is run under European standards.
The grounds on which a mark can be refused or annulled in France are broader than many US practitioners expect. The main category is earlier trademarks:
Beyond trademarks, French law recognizes a non-exhaustive list of other prior rights, including:
No search can cover all of these. There is no copyright register, so copyright antecedents cannot be searched at all. In practice, searches focus on registered trademarks and company names, and we recommend also checking earlier domain names used in a related field of activity. French company names can be searched through the Trade and Companies Register (RCS).
There are two levels of search, and the difference matters when you decide how much risk assessment to buy.
An identical search retrieves marks that are identical to your sign or contain the same string of letters. It is fast and cheap, and it is what free online databases give you. It will not surface marks that are merely similar rather than identical — which is precisely where most European oppositions come from.
A similarity search (recherche de similarité) is built around the legal test: a registered mark is protected against any later sign that is identical or similar, with similarity assessed visually, phonetically and conceptually. The search engines therefore generate candidate lists covering:
The phonetic layer is where identical searches fail most visibly. To take the French example used on our source pages: the sound “KA” can be written KA, CA, QUA or KHA. An identical string search catches one spelling; a similarity search catches all four.
Two parameters drive the scope (and cost) of any search:
A raw hit list is not an opinion. The lawyer’s work is applying the European likelihood-of-confusion framework to each relevant hit: how close are the signs visually, phonetically, conceptually; how close are the goods and services; how distinctive is the earlier mark; who is the relevant public. The output you should expect is a graded risk assessment — which hits are fatal, which are manageable (coexistence, limitation of the specification, a different territory strategy), and which can be ignored.
The depth of that assessment scales with what you ask for. A more complete search and analysis costs more because it takes more attorney time; the trade-off is between a knock-out check before brainstorming shortlists and a full opinion before a launch you cannot easily reverse. A mark that clears search is also worth protecting going forward — clearance tells you the register today, a watch service tells you who files next to you tomorrow, and if a conflicting application does appear, the opposition route before INPI is the cost-effective response.
Search fees depend on the number of classes, the territories covered, and the depth of analysis (knock-out vs. full similarity search with a written opinion). [VERIFY: clearance search fee schedule — not stated in the French source pages; quote from the firm’s current rate card]. Fees are billed in EUR or USD. Official register access itself involves no office fee; see trademark fees and costs for the filing fees that typically follow a clean search.
GOMIS & LACKER runs French, EU and international clearance from Paris: identical and full similarity searches across FR/EUTM/international registers and French company names, followed by a written availability opinion with concrete recommendations — file, modify, or walk away. We regularly act as European clearance counsel for US firms and in-house teams ahead of EU launches.
Ready to clear a mark for France or the EU? Contact us for a scoped quote within one business day.
Renewing French and EU trademarks: 10-year terms, renewal windows, 6-month grace periods, official fees — and no use declarations, unlike the USPTO.
Assignments, change-of-name and address recordals before INPI and the EUIPO: why recording matters, fees, timing, documents — and INPI erratum requests.
Why watch French and EU registers: the 2-month INPI opposition window is non-extendable. What we monitor, how conflicts are flagged, and what happens next.