Vera Van Os: From temp to trademark maven

Meet our trademark experts

What started as a temporary office placement became a career passion for trademark research for Vera Van Os, our Content Principal Support Analyst for EMEA.

It started back in 1987 when Vera was assigned by a temp agency to provide office support for CompuMark™ in Antwerp.

“I thought it would just be for a few weeks,” Vera recalls, noting that when she was offered a full-time position, she jumped at the chance to take it. “I found trademarks very interesting, all the different countries, publications and languages. It was just a new world for me.”

Vera started out in data entry, but eventually she moved to the team performing trademark indexing as some of the longtime department staff began to retire.

“This was specialized work, indexing trademarks and identifying the important elements, owner information and other data. I found it really interesting,” said Vera, recalling that during her training, she questioned the rules for indexing and curating data. “I would ask ‘Why are we doing it this way?’”

New trends, new approaches

Her questioning took on new urgency in the 1990s due to changes in the trademark landscape, including the trend toward brand extensions, which involved multiple product variations within the same trademark. “The trademark world was changing and we had to start indexing these marks in a different way,” says Vera, who took the lead in developing new guidelines for coding and scoring trademark elements to improve data curation. These enhancements formed the basis for ongoing improvements that continue today, setting Clarivate trademark data apart as the gold standard for quality and searchability.

Vera also took on the task of training new trademark indexing staff. “It was very intensive training. It took six to eight months to train new indexers,” she says, noting that this in-depth training was critical to ensure both data accuracy and speed of indexing.

Meanwhile, new technologies were emerging to streamline trademark data workflows and new databases created to accommodate the growing scope and complexity of global trademark data. Vera contributed substantially in the roll-out of these systems, working closely with technology teams to ensure the new tools aligned with the needs of trademark analysts and with customers. This strategic combination of human expertise and advanced technology remains a hallmark of the Clarivate approach to IP data, as evidenced in groundbreaking solutions like our Brand Landscape Analyzer. It combines trademark and litigation data with artificial intelligence, informed by trademark experts, enabling IP professionals to rapidly assess brand risk.

Optimizing data quality

Vera has also played a key role within our quality team, enhancing processes to ensure data quality from ingestion to generation of search and watch results. “We built in additional checks to catch any potential errors that might be in the source data,” she explains. That includes informing the patent trademark offices (PTOs) when errors are found in their records. “In curating data, we add value with additional information, including logo letters, phonetics and converting written numbers to numerals to aid searching.” These enhancements, unique to Clarivate, help reduce the risk of missing critical results, while avoiding irrelevant hits.

When the SAEGIS® database collection was expanded globally, setting the industry standard for worldwide coverage, Vera took an active role in in this important project. “We built the database covering more than 126 registers and millions of records in just eight months,” she recalls proudly.

The value of expertise

The knowledge and experience Vera has gained through her decades of experience come into play daily in her current role as Content Principal Support Analyst.

“My experience in every step of data processing informs everything I do,” Vera says, noting that her in-depth knowledge of how Clarivate trademark content is created and curated enables her to address any trademark content questions, supporting customer-facing teams.

“We are the quality keepers of our trademark databases.”

She added that having a team of experienced professionals with deep trademark expertise is a crucial complement to advanced automated technologies. “At Clarivate, the content team works closely with the technology and operations teams to ensure that the output is of the highest quality.”

Relentlessly curious, Vera enjoys acquiring and sharing new knowledge today as much as she did 35 years ago. And while she doesn’t have direct contact with customers, a keen focus on their needs guides her every day. “Customers have expectations for trademark content quality, accuracy and relevance. We make sure the results Clarivate delivers measure up to those expectations.”

Discover how AI enhanced our expert-refined trademark data.