New York

Firm overview

At Fross Zelnick, we secure and defend our clients’ most valuable assets—their brands, designs, and content. 

• Our trademark practice is unmatched. After five decades, we’ve developed a singular trademark practice serving clients in the United States and around the world. We’ve handled every type of trademark issue and dispute, multiple times for multiple companies in multiple jurisdictions, from the simplest registration to the thorniest cross-jurisdictional enforcement action. 

• We boast top-tier copyright experience, with a special emphasis on defending creative works, including character rights, branding assets, and product design. For decades we’ve assisted clients as they navigate the consequences of new technological frontiers – most recently, digital, and virtual performance rights and blockchain-based technologies. 

• Our patent practice focuses exclusively on design patents, with particular expertise in developing multi-pronged strategies combining patent, trademark, and copyright law to protect our clients’ prized works. 

The breadth and depth of our practice has attracted a wide range of clients, from celebrated brands, industry leaders, and renowned content providers to disruptive startups and regional companies, all of whom rely on us to protect their unique properties at home and around the world. Many of the largest corporate law firms rely on our advice for unique or hard-to-handle U.S. and international issues. 

Our capabilities include: 

Top-Tier IP Litigation

We are a renowned trademark and copyright litigation firm, with a reputation for both aggressive advocacy in court and quick, favorable settlements out of court. We know how to fight and win—whether in our backyard or in the most intractable foreign jurisdictions.

Strategic and Nuanced Registration Strategies

We register trademarks, copyrights, and design patents with our clients’ business goals in mind. Our cross-discipline expertise means we leverage multiple legal strategies to shore up strong protections for the most hard-to-defend assets. We obtain rights that ward off newcomers and stand up in court. We are one of the most prolific filers of U.S. trademark applications, and our expertise in the finer points of U.S. trademark prosecution is second to none.

Global Portfolio Management

With our unparalleled in-house knowledge of international IP law, we provide unrivaled advice for global portfolio management, litigations, and transactions around the globe. Our dynamic, carefully selected network of foreign counsel helps us guide U.S. and foreign clients alike as they identify, protect, and defend their rights under copyright, trademark, trade dress, design patent, domain name, and related laws worldwide. Our international capabilities are just as robust as our local prowess.

Deal Expertise

Whether a client is buying or selling an entire business or a portion of an intellectual property portfolio, we’ve seen it before - and can advise on how to structure the deal to fit the client’s goals. We conduct due diligence reviews for mergers, acquisitions, and other corporate ventures, and formulate efficient worldwide strategies to record the corporate changes against their clients’ IP registrations. Many of the country’s premier M&A attorneys partner with us on the IP components of larger transactions.

Services on the Cutting Edge

Thanks to our more than 50-year legacy, we’ve been witness to the birth and evolution of nearly every technology that’s central to the modern economy. From in-the-trenches Uniform Dispute Resolution Proceeding litigations against cybersquatters, to the rapidly changing intersection of IP rights and blockchain innovations like NFTs, to educating trademark offices around the world on new technological intersections, we’re helping clients successfully steer through uncharted waters and prepare for what’s to come.

Protection of Celebrities and Cherished Characters

From Batman to Harry Potter, we protect famous characters through sophisticated copyright and trademark protection strategies and enforcement against infringers. We’ve also retrieved numerous infringing trademarks and domain names for celebrities and litigate high-profile, right-of-publicity cases involving the unauthorized use of well-known names and likenesses, all within a quickly evolving legal landscape.

Combating Counterfeiting

We’ve developed sophisticated and cost-effective enforcement programs for preventing the importation, sale, and distribution of infringing or counterfeit products. Our experience is capacious, including apparel, footwear, cosmetics, jewelry, and luxury goods products. Included in these programs is the recordal of relevant intellectual property rights with Customs in the United States and abroad.

Firm overview

Founded in 1957, we are recognized worldwide as a leading intellectual property law and litigation firm. We also represent clients in the areas of advertising, media & technology; customs, international cargo & regulatory compliance; corporate and commercial law; real estate law; trusts & estates; and military law. We have achieved extraordinary results for many of our clients in these and other areas. We strive to provide top-notch service and practical and cost-effective expertise, advice, and representation.

We work collaboratively, staff projects efficiently, and maintain long-term relationships with our clients who appreciate our responsiveness, dedication, experience, and sophistication. Our firm has a collegial atmosphere and employs attorneys and professional staff who speak Spanish, French, Haitian Creole, Russian, Serbian, Hebrew, Mandarin, Hindi/Punjabi, Romanian, and other languages.

Firm overview

Barnes & Thornburg’s Intellectual Property practice is among the largest in the country, with nearly 130 IP attorneys and professionals and 75 registered patent attorneys and agents. Our clients know that their intellectual property — inventions, brands and trade secrets — are as valuable as their factories, laboratories and inventories. We believe that intellectual property must be cultivated and nourished to grow as an asset and without the right care, it will wither.

Our team works diligently to help clients succeed in overseeing and protecting their valuable IP with employees, customers, partners and competitors, and to avoid infringement of the IP rights of others. We position and leverage our client’s critical IP in industry and specialized markets, and defend patent, trademark and copyright integrity in the judicial system and in agency review and appeals.

We assist product development, marketing, sales and finance teams with comprehensive IP programs and protect products from copying by competitors. We advise on IP holdings valued into the billions of dollars of market share, representing Fortune 500 companies with thousands of IP assets, as well as startup companies defined by a single patent. Our attorneys are committed to client service, cohesive teamwork, responsiveness and useful advice.

From coast to coast, we counsel clients from a variety of industries, such as medical device, plastics and packaging, internet and computer technology, food and beverage, pharmaceutical, automotive and aviation. With decades of experience, we understand that the many types of IP assets drive core business strategy and brand development. Our cost-conscious solutions help clients derive as much value from their intellectual resources as from their human resources.

Firm overview

Haley Guiliano started as the patent practice spin-off from Ropes & Gray LLP. The Haley Guiliano team has extensive experience with representing clients of all sizes and across a multitude of industries around the globe in connection with intellectual property matters. All of our attorneys and patent agents have technical and scientific backgrounds, many of whom have graduate degrees. We are used to counseling and representing clients on high stakes complex matters – relying on both our legal analysis expertise and technological know-how.

We tailor our relationship for every one of our clients, recognizing that a cookie-cutter approach to IP representations is not adequate. We make it a point to understand our client’s business, its needs, and its goals. This underpins the work that we perform in the course of our representation.

Haley Guiliano is selective in hiring talented candidates with exceptional legal and technical/scientific backgrounds. We invest in our legal team and support staff. This includes providing each person with opportunities to work on a wide scope of projects in addition to specializing in a respective practice area. Haley Guiliano has developed an environment that fosters professional development and collegiality.

As a client, this means your matters will be handled by a team of Haley Guiliano professionals with a broad range of experience, who are able to learn about your business and your needs. This institutional knowledge will be a continuous mainstay during the course of our representation.