Volunteer Spotlight: Tove Graulund

Tove Graulund (Graulund Consulting, Denmark)

Tove Graulund, founder of Graulund Consulting in Søborg, Denmark, provides business development advice to intellectual property (IP) law firms, helping them to develop their practices not only in a marketing sense but also in terms of improving what they do and how they do it. She has been involved with INTA for about three decades, including attending her first INTA Annual Meeting in San Antonio, Texas, USA, in 1997.

With this depth of experience, she has seen trademark law and practice evolve over the years. Ms. Graulund thinks that the most important issues in trademark law today are enforcement and brand restrictions.

“The increase in online trading is making it even more difficult for brand owners,” she said, “and the rules similar to plain packaging are being introduced in more countries, resulting in constraints on the brand owner’s ability to navigate and, on occasion, causing permanent damage to the brand.”

She highly values INTA, noting: “I would go as far as to say that if you are not a member of INTA, you do not exist in the trademark world.”

She is pleased that INTA has stepped up its initiatives in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. “The brand owners’ perspective was much needed there,” she said, “and INTA has helped to make that happen.”

Ms. Graulund’s first committee assignment at INTA was the Trademark Office Practices Committee, on which she served two terms, followed by two terms on the Trademark Administrators Committee. Currently, she serves on the INTA Bulletins Committee, where she leads the Building Bridges Project Team and conducts outreach to solicit INTA Bulletin articles from members on other committees.

Ms. Graulund has an international perspective. She likes the Madrid Protocol because it is an easy-access, global filing option for brand owners, and classifies that her biggest achievement in IP to date is helping to establish the obligation for designated offices to issue the Statement of Grant of Protection when a Madrid Protocol designation has made it through the examination procedure.

When she is not working, Ms. Graulund enjoys spending time with her family and in her garden. She also loves art. “I have been known to cry in front of a painting. Monet can do that to me,” she said.

One of her favorite trademarks is ARLA, “the brand of a Danish dairy company that became also Swedish, British, and much more as the years went by.” In addition, she likes coined terms. “I do not like descriptive marks, and I have fought against marks that are too suggestive time and again,” she said. Rather, she recommends that trademark owners build their brands on coined terms, noting: “And then you can use all the descriptive and suggestive words you want on the rest of the label!”

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