Garrett Hutchinson

Practices

• Intellectual Property
  • Advertising, Entertainment & Media
  • Trademarks

Biography

Garrett is an intellectual property (IP) attorney with a passion for helping his clients turn their names, slogans, and logos into valuable and protectible brands. Garrett’s practice centers on trademark, copyright, and unfair competition issues, with a focus on trademark prosecution, counseling, licensing, enforcement, and litigation. In addition to helping his clients protect their own intellectual property, Garrett also provides effective and efficient counseling to assist clients in developing risk management and intellectual property compliance strategies, including helping clients ensure they are compliant with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Garrett also regularly handles adversarial proceedings in the intellectual property sphere, ranging from recovering domain names from cybersquatters via Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution (UDRP) proceedings, for which Garrett has a pristine record of success, to defense and prosecution of inter partes proceedings before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board.

Garrett’s previous work as In-House Counsel for a major celebrity intellectual property licensing agency provides him with valuable perspectives into the intersection of intellectual property and entertainment law, as well as a deep and practical knowledge in Right of Publicity law, on which his published work is often cited. As part of this role, Garrett also worked as part of the legal support team for one of the leading intellectual property valuation attorneys in the entertainment industry. Garrett’s experience in preparing valuation reports relating to celebrity IP for a variety of purposes (such as posthumous tax disputes and civil damages assessments) provides him with unique insights into the inner mechanics of IP valuation.

In addition to his entertainment industry experience, Garrett services clients in all industries and sectors. Garrett’s broad experience includes matters such as managing global trademark enforcement for a leading computer hardware manufacturer; assisting one of the world’s largest breweries with trademark prosecution and enforcement matters; assisting major lenders with negotiating and recording intellectual property interests as security for significant loans and transactions; assisting a major fast-food chain in developing a comprehensive IP strategy to capitalize on attention arising from positive public relations and social media events; and counseling biotech companies and other startups on maximizing IP assets while minimizing IP risks in order to assist with obtaining seed funding.

Outside of the office, Garrett enjoys home craft bartending, playing the guitar and piano, and writing fiction. Because of his experience as a writer and musician, Garrett understands the significance an artist places on their creation, and as such Garrett particularly enjoys assisting his clients in obtaining copyright protection for their works, helping them track down and stop plagiarists, and defending them against unfounded claims of infringement.