Presented at the Sinch Online Legal Services Conference in (virtual) Sydney 2015-05-15

1. Transforming trademark search
with artificial intelligence
Anna Ronkainen @ronkaine
Chief Scientist, TrademarkNow
anna.ronkainen@trademarknow.com

2. About TrademarkNow
- innovative legal technology provider
founded in 2012, based in Helsinki, NYC
and Kilkenny, now ~30 employees
- products based on a unique AI model of
likelihood of confusion for trademarks,
based on my own basic research in
computational legal theory (since 2002)
- NameCheck: intelligent TM search
- NameWatch: intelligent TM watch

3. Trademark search: Ye olde way
- TM lawyer formulates search strategy
(wildcards & classes to be used etc.)
- paralegal carries out the search and hands
the results to the lawyer
- lawyer browses through the results and
marks the ones for which more info needed
- paralegal retrieves additional info
- lawyer reviews said info, evaluates risk

4. Trademark search: The new way

5. Trademark search: The new way

6. Not just trademark search

7. Core component: AI model of
likelihood of confusion (TM similarity)
- similarity of trademarks
- phonetical
- graphic
- semantic
- currently only word marks
- similarity of goods and services
- others do this only using the 45 classes of
the Nice Classification

8. Mix-and-match approach to AI
techniques
- traditionally AI has been divided into to
factions: rule-based and statistical
- all our competitors are also either-or
- both have their advantages and
disadvantages
- unlike the mainstream, we’re flexible and
use both as we see fit, to maximize their
benefits

9. Rule-based vs. statistical
- easy to get started
- understandable
- easy to modify
- modified manually
- can only handle
known cases well
- requires clean
inputs
- requires good data
- impenetrable
- hard to revise
- can learn
- much better at
handling noisy or
unforeseen data

10. Thank you!
Questions?