Not necessarily; you can monitor trademark infringement yourself. However, we'd recommend considering a service for the following reasons:
- Time savings: Outsourcing trademark monitoring means you'll have more time to focus on growing your business.
- Consistency: If you want to monitor your selected IP database once a month, which is a standard, it will get hard to remember, and you might miss your window.
- All-in-one-ness: You don't have to search multiple IP registers each time. This is useful if you own a trademark in numerous countries, but not only then. For example, if you own a German trademark, you'll probably still want to monitor Germany's IP office (DPMA) as well as the EU's IP office (EUIPO) since both German and EU marks can infringe upon yours.
- Calibrated results: As more and more applications get filed each year globally, it's easy to get overwhelmed by monitoring results. A good report will filter out what you don't need.
If you are interested in giving a monitoring service a chance, check out our Trademark Watch.