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Have you made it easy for strangers to hijack your brand?   
It’s often said that branding is storytelling, and it’s a dead-on statement.  You wouldn’t ask a stranger with bad intentions to tell the story of your business.  But that may be what you’re doing if you don’t take steps to protect your brand identity.  Your trademark – the embodiment of your brand – is the place in the mind of a consumer that links your brand to your business.  If the brand is not protected, this connection can be lost or needlessly muddled.  High stakes indeed.
In this fast-paced session, we’ll discuss –

• what a trademark is (and isn’t),
• how to start out a business on a solid trademark footing,
• what it means to register a trademark – and how to do it,
• steps to take to be vigilant about infringement,
• ways in which brand value can be corroded from within,
• how domain names fit into the brand equation,
• what brand protection means in a post-pandemic world that’s driven by e-commerce and affected by social media influences,
• five brand protect takeaways to start your Friday.

About the Presenter:  Jared Burden, a Harrisonburg-based Partner in the Virginia law firm GreeneHurlocker PLC, is a hands-on transactional business attorney whose practice over several decades has always been focused (whether directly or indirectly) on assuring that business owners maintain the value of their brand.  Jared has served as inside and outside general counsel to mature middle-market companies with tens of millions of revenue as well as individual entrepreneurs taking their first steps to actualize their big idea.  Jared is a graduate of Duke University and the University of Virginia School of Law, and has lived with his wife Jenny Burden and family in Harrisonburg for 20 years.