Indian AI Pioneer MikeLegal Launches Trademark Platform

Indian legal AI pioneer, MikeLegal, which provides legal research in areas such as IP, has now launched an NLP-driven trademark (TM) service, which offers search and an automated ‘TM watch’ capability.

Artificial Lawyer recently caught up with Delhi-based co-founder, Anshul Gupta, to find out more.

‘Currently the way trademarks are searched for in the market, when you’re looking at a new name for a product, it becomes extremely challenging as current softwares are extremely primitive. [They are] providing basic search capabilities which leads to similar marks being missed and high inefficiency,’ says Gupta.

‘Moreover today if organisations wants to analyze if new trademarks in the market are infringing their marks it can be extremely difficult as it is currently done manually, which takes a huge amount of time. A lot of marks that may be phonetically or deceptively similar are also missed, leading to the firm having loss of brand value,’ he adds.

Hence the new MikeTM Suite, which among other things provides an ‘AI-based contextual search’, the ability to test the vulnerability of your mark, and you can set up a ‘watch’ function that scours public sources and sends you a report on anything out there that may be relevant, or similar to your product.

The key points here are that by automating the review and watch process using NLP you naturally increase speed, but you also raise the possibility of finding things humans may have missed in the vast world of written or unstructured data out there.

Artificial Lawyer also put a few additional questions to Gupta, here’s what he said:

Which TM data do you access/where is it? How many TMs do you analyze?

We have the entire trademark database currently available in India. We have analyzed more than 4 million trademarks to create our AI system.

– What is the tech you are using? Is this a type of NLP?

We have our own in-house algorithms that use various NLP concepts and phoneme matching that can extract potential infringements and similarities.

– Could you comment on what this means for lawyers? How important is this?

Adoption of such technology can be a game changer for lawyers. Currently the reliance on inefficient tools and manual intervention is extremely high, which results in a huge amount of time and data loss.

More importantly with the current approach for finding if a new trademark is infringing your mark is extremely difficult as the volume of new marks is so high, and missing out on such data can have a huge impact on a brand.

With adoption of AI technology to solve this problem, lawyers can get an analysis within hours which previously took days, be sure there is zero leakage of relevant data and identify important data points faster, and with much more ease without hiring associates to do the same.

– Do you have any beta clients using this yet?

Yes, we have various law firms and corporates using the above solutions.

– Is this mainly aimed at Indian companies, or all companies globally?

We are currently focused on companies interested in protecting their brand in India, however we have plans on going global by early next year.

– Last question: what will be the pricing model?

Subscription based model with yearly subscriptions.

Thanks! And good luck. Great to see how India’s legal AI sector is going from strength to strength.