Legal Question in Business Law in New York

Re: Trademark Ownership

More information about your LLC and its dissolution would be needed to properly address your question. If you dissolved your company pursuant to NY LLC law, you should have dealt with all the LLC's assets and liabilities, ie, paying off the debts and distributing the remaining assets. You would need an attorney to review the dissolution paper work. If you used an attorney to do the dissolution, I'd recommend consulting this attorney. If you did it on your own, I would strongly recommend that you now consult an attorney with respect to this matter. The lawyers at The Fidelis Law Group are experience in NY LLC law, and LLC dissolution matters, and can assist you with this matter. If you would like to discuss this matter, please contact us at [email protected] (with copy to [email protected]).

Re: Trademark Ownership

What is not clear from your question is whether your company ever registered a federal or at least a state trademark in its name. Do you have a certificate of registration from USPTO for this mark ?

If so, the trademark may generally be transferred to another party by means of an assinment. The dissolution of the registrant should not prevent such assignment as the ownership of the mark as one of the assets of the LLC would have been passed to the members of the LLC (assuming all of its liabilities were satisfied from the other assets of the company).

If you never registered this trademark, your company may have had some "common law" trademark rights based on the use of the mark in connection with its products or services (possibly coupled with certificates of assumed name or "dba" certificates) but transferring those is more difficult now that the company is no longer in existence. Also, unregistered marks have less of a value, especially when there are competing marks out there.

Of course, if by "trademark," you are referring to the tradename, or the corporate name, then with the dissolution of the company using such name you no longer have any rights to transfer to anyone whatsoever.

Collect the information on your ownership of the mark and speak to a trademark attorney to get advice on your specific situation and get answers to your questions.

The above response is in the nature of general information, is not legal advice and should not be relied upon as such.