Making your trademarks tamper-proof can keep your business from breaking.

You wouldn’t open your office for business but then go home without locking up, right? That’s essentially what you’re doing if you don’t secure your business ideas. By taking the proper steps, you can protect your trademarks — and your business—using intellectual property laws.

Chicago attorney Kara E.F. Cenar of Bell, Boyd & Lloyd contends that small businesses should start thinking about these issues as early as possible. “Small businesses tend to delay securing intellectual property protection because of the expense,” Cenar says. “They tend not to see the value of intellectual property until a competitor infringes.” But a business that hasn’t registered its trademark and actively defended it may have trouble making its case in court.

Your first experience with intellectual property is likely to be your trademark, since you need to think about that before choosing a name for your company.  Note that your trademark might include not only your name, but also a slogan, symbol, picture or logo. It’s about how people identify your business — how they know that what they’re looking at comes from your company. Think, for instance, of General Mills’ cursive “G,” Apple Inc.’s apple with a missing bite and Nike’s phrase “Just do it.”

If you’ve registered your trademark, you indicate that with an ® behind the name. If it’s a trademark you’re using but haven’t registered, you use a small TM instead. A “service mark,” sometimes seen as a small SM behind a name, identifies a service company such as a retail store.

Any trademark you use is protected under common law as soon as you start to use it — like on your sign or in your ads. Under common law, the first entity to use a particular name, slogan or symbol has the right to it. So if you’re just planning a single shop, it might be enough to know that no similar business in town is using the same name. But if you have aspirations to go further, you’d better have a proper trademark search done and register your mark.

State trademark registration is simple, fairly quick and inexpensive, but it only protects your trademark in your state — so someone with a federal patent still gets first dibs on it.

It’s best to register your trademarks with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. You can do a preliminary trademark search online, but because of the complexity of the process, you should still use an intellectual property lawyer to make sure it’s done right. Since the process can take several years, you start by filing an “intent to use,” which is an image of the trademark and a sworn affidavit that you intend to use it in commerce.

International trademark protection, which you’ll want if you plan to set up shop online, is especially complicated. That’s even more reason to spend the $2,000 or so it costs to have an experienced trademark lawyer search the USPTO, NAFTA and the international registry of the World Intellectual Property Organization, as well as state databases and common-law uses. Once you’re properly registered, you have exclusive rights to your trademark in the U.S. and more than 60 other countries.

After you have applied for your trademark, the next step is protecting it. You have to monitor the marketplace for knockoffs and trademark infringement and take increasingly firm steps to enforce your rights. These typically begin with your attorney’s letter of warning to the infringer. If the infringer doesn’t stop, you might have to sue. Courts are often willing to issue a cease-and-desist order and sometimes even assess damages. But if you fail to be vigilant, you may lose your trademark.

What’s the lesson in all of this? Sleep on your intellectual property rights and you’ll lose them. Be proactive and you’ll protect them — and save money in the long run.  

Excerpted from Entrepreneur Magazine’s Start Your Own Business (Entrepreneur Press)