A trademark can help brands protect their reputation and profits, but the application process is often seen as confusing, complicated and not worth the investment, making business owners put it off or disregard it altogether. Trama's mission is to change this and make brand protection more accessible to businesses. With over 5,000 trademarks it helped register in just two years, it's already one of the top players on the global market. In this interview, Trama's CTO Andrej Skok talks about how Trama utilizes technology to cut time spent on tedious legal tasks, how the innovation of the legal sector is coming along, and why Trama is not using AI - yet.
How is using Trama different from just going to a trademark attorney?
The upside of Trama is the digital experience. We try to take the process to the 21st century. You don't have to physically visit your lawyer and spend two hours there, you can do it in the evening at home or even on a bus, which is what people who are starting their own business want today.
The second thing is that sometimes when you want to get a trademark in more jurisdictions, you have to find multiple lawyers. So you'd have one in the USA, one in the UK, one in Australia. Or you can come to us, tell us once what you need and in how many countries and we will take care of it.
Trama calls itself a "legal-tech startup", what does it mean exactly?
For the tech part of the business, the first idea was that it should be some kind of artificial intelligence (AI). But this failed miserably. If you have a couple of tens of thousands of euros, it's probably impossible to do a proper AI, which would evaluate whether your trademark is eligible for registration. Then for quite some time, Trama was really just about bringing a really good eCommerce experience for buying trademarks.
Now we are moving toward real tech, which means automating a lot of things. These repetitive tasks, which lawyers are doing every day, we try to get rid of them. Eventually, we want to get rid of everything in the process, which is not the professional input of the lawyer.
"To give you a number, in the last three months, the time our lawyers spent on drafting an application decreased by 33%. That's a pretty great result. We still want to cut that by another 60% or 70% and we think that it is completely doable."
So you are trying to automate repetitive manual tasks that attorneys encounter in their day-to-day work. Do you feel your effort is making a difference there?
Yes, you can see in the numbers that the time our lawyers need to spend on one registration is decreasing quite sharply. And it's not just thanks to our tech, it's also thanks to better processes, but I would say these two things are pretty tied together. With the legal team, we are always trying to redefine the process and find the spots where tech can help even further. So I currently have a feeling that it is helping to a great extent, but it can do more.
To give you a number, in the last three months, the time our lawyers spent on drafting an application decreased by 33%. That's a pretty great result. We still want to cut that by another 60% or 70% and we think that it is completely doable.
And what remains is the time for the attorney's professional input, which clients need to have and should have, of course. That will not be replaced by technology anytime soon, but the rest can be optimized and shaved off.
So you are working closely with your legal team to build your product. How is the collaboration coming along?
When I first started at Trama, I scheduled a couple of interviews with our lawyers, which we have done several times since then. But at first, I wanted to gather feedback on the current state of the admin portal in which they were managing orders at the time. And I received a lot of feedback like "there is nothing to improve, it's perfect, you should have seen the software we had to use in my previous job". I imagine their "legal childhood" was difficult because for me it was far from perfect.
So I think our metrics are a bit different. I had a feeling that they do not have high expectations. So I'm trying to level this up. Prove to them that we can deliver something even better. And show them that when they suggest something, their ideas can see the light of the world.
"I had a feeling that our lawyers did not have high expectations. So I'm trying to level this up. Prove to them that we can deliver something even better. And show them that when they suggest something, their ideas can see the light of the world."
To be able to develop the product, you had to learn a lot about trademarks yourself . Is there anything that surprised you?
Yes. I had completely different expectations from what it turned out to be actually. My first expectation was that you know, in law, there's this pretty properly defined set of rules by which everybody is playing. I didn't think that it's completely this way, I know the rules in real life are always relaxed, but now I think that it's complete magic.
When I first started, I had to ask a lot of questions. Nowadays, we have the Trademark Academy on our website with articles for our users, so maybe nowadays it would be a little bit easier for me. But right now, I'm pretty satisfied with my knowledge of the magical world of law. (laugh)
The European Union Intellectual Property Office has recently introduced its new API, which you're going to use to file applications automatically from your system instead of having your lawyers fill it out manually. Do you feel the innovation of the sector is already afoot?
It's going slowly, but it's getting there. From my perspective, the API is not such a great innovation. Maybe if it happened 30 years ago, it would be considered as such. But yes, in the world of law, even this can be considered a pretty big step in the right direction. Even though we are talking just about the EU, which has an office with maybe the most resources.
Do you see any other examples of innovation within the field?
The idea of automation is nothing new in the field and it's probably the easiest challenge to tackle actually. I see a lot of automation initiatives which are doing a great job, like in document management, scanning, transcribing, but it's more like a module here, a module there. In our small niche part of the legal world, the IP world, anything beyond automation will be a pretty hard job to do these days.
Why is it so? You've also said the original idea for Trama was to employ AI, why was it abandoned?
AI needs to start with data. You have to feed it to the algorithm to teach it how to make decisions. You cannot create AI without the data. For us, AI is sort of recreating the mind of a lawyer in a machine form. But currently, even lawyers in our company cannot find a common ground in certain cases, which is natural. And it would be even harder for a computer to make the decisions.
"We really try to minimize the need for client interactions within the process. The next part is focusing on lawyers. I see this computer-lawyer interaction, which we will definitely be exploring further."
Are you still keeping options open about AI?
Yes, definitely. We are already processing a lot of data, so we are saving it and we'll try to prepare it for the future in which we might have some AI tool available to our lawyers.
Since you said that automation in itself is nothing new and since Trama is not the only provider on the market who uses it, in what ways would you say Trama does things differently?
I would say that it's probably the scale. We are trying to automate the whole pipeline, we don't just pick one part and focus on that. We really try to minimize the need for client interactions within the process. The next part is focusing on lawyers. I see this computer-lawyer interaction, which we will definitely be exploring further. The tools which we are creating right now are taking this into account. The next step for us is to develop a series of algorithms to help lawyers make decisions. A fully autonomous algorithm, with the potential to replace the lawyer's professional input is however still years away. Trama will definitely explore this direction as much as possible. And we will try to push the boundary to lead the innovation in the IP sector.