Our client, an established food company, wanted to introduce a new product to the marketplace and had identified the perfect trademark to promote it. They asked us to federally register the trademark for them. During due diligence, we discovered that a couple of days earlier a competitor formed a corporation using the exact same name as the trademark our client wanted. He was trying to beat our client to the punch.
Forming a corporation does not give one rights in a trademark. We filed a federal application for the trademark that night to establish priority and sent the competitor a certified letter telling them we would file suit if they tried to sell a product that had the name of their new corporation on it. The competitor knew they were beat and abandoned the corporation and the name that our client wanted to use as its new trademark.
Case closed.