Revolutionizing the In-House Trademark Strategy at ADM

Intellectual property is the lifeblood of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), an innovative leader in the agricultural and business space.

ADM manages a substantial global portfolio consisting of a robust patent catalog and approximately 12,000 trademarks, with the earliest mark dating back to 1887.

Overseeing this operation is Ed Lance, Global Lead Trademark Counsel at ADM, with nearly 40 years in the trademark field. Ed leads a highly specialized global team that handles everything from M&A support to ongoing prosecution, renewals, enforcement, and complex international opposition proceedings.

The Challenge: The Burden of "À La Carte" Pricing

Before partnering with Corsearch, ADM’s trademark team faced a significant operational bottleneck. 

Their previous vendor operated on an expensive "à la carte" pricing model. Every time the team needed to expand a search into a new jurisdiction or modify a query, they were hit with incremental charges.

This friction made it nearly impossible to justify the cost of comprehensive in-house searches, forcing the team to either ration their data or rely heavily on a large roster of expensive foreign counsel. ADM needed a solution that would empower their teams to bring search work in-house without breaking the budget, allowing them to focus on their primary goal: providing high-level strategic advice and counsel for ADM's global expansion.

The Solution: Flat-Fee Freedom and AI Power

After speaking with Barb Barron Kelly, Vice President of Global Customer Advocacy at Corsearch, Ed and his team evaluated the TrademarkNow platform. The decision to switch was clear, driven by Corsearch's ability to offer a robust, AI-powered tool paired with a transparent pricing structure.

Key capabilities adopted by ADM include:

Flat-Fee model: This was ADM's non-negotiable requirement - Corsearch’s flat-fee arrangement eliminated the inconvenience of incremental charges, finally giving the team the freedom to conduct comprehensive global searches entirely in-house.

ExaMatch^TM for global grouping: ExaMatch^TM quickly became Ed’s most frequently used tool, with the team using it multiple times per day. The platform's intuitive regional groupings allowed for instant access to results from EMEA, for example, and eliminated the tedious process of manually selecting individual countries.

LogoCheck: The team leverages this visual AI tool to instantly generate search queries and results simply by dropping a design mark into the system. This drastically cuts down on manual visual clearance time, allowing confident opinions to be made in real time. 

The Impact: Real-Time Intelligence and Strategic Storytelling

The adoption of Corsearch fundamentally shifted how ADM's legal team operates, moving them from administrative managers to strategic business partners:

Elevating the Legal Team's Reputation

During a recent strategy call, Ed was asked to clear a mark for a new platform. Instead of delaying the project, he used ExaMatch's regional filters to pull accurate, reliable data in real-time. Delivering an answer within a 30-minute meeting significantly enhanced the legal team's reputation as agile enablers of business.

Telling the Story of the Portfolio

Beyond immediate clearance, Ed relies on Corsearch to manipulate registry data and generate accurate reports about ADM's global portfolio. To aid in its M&A support function, Ed’s team relies on Corsearch's direct registry connection to provide a cleaner, more reliable foundation for measuring ROI and proving the monetary value of their IP to the C-suite.

"I would advise other legal teams facing similar challenges with reliability and cost to adopt TrademarkNow - especially if they are conducting in-house searches or want to save money by moving away from external firms for preliminary searches."

^{Ed Lance, Global Lead Trademark Counsel, ADM}

The Future of TrademarkNow

The partnership between ADM and Corsearch continues to evolve, with Ed praising seamless onboarding and the ongoing support from the Corsearch team.

Looking ahead, ADM is eager to explore future innovations for tools to support IP professionals navigating the complex and fast-moving world of Trademarks - with over 75 years in the industry, they can rely on Corsearch to be at the forefront of that innovation.