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One of the more exciting things to do when you open up a company or, in this case, a
corporation is select the name of the corporation. Whenever I have a client who's looking to
select the name for their corporation, I have them look in one of four places. The first
place that I have them look is with the California Secretary of State. The California Secretary
of State has a business division's section and they have an internet and you can do a
business search to see whether or not another company has used your name or your desired
name and is currently using it now, which would prevent you from also using it. The
second place that I have people look is Google. Google is a great place to look because it
picks up use of names not only in a particular county or city or state, but it also picks
it up federally. One of the things I always warn clients about is making certain that
in the selection of the name of their company, they're not going to violate another person's
claim to that particular trade name. The third place that I have people look is the United
States Patent and Trademark Office. The USPTO has a website where you can go. It's in the
trademark section and they do trademark electronic searches and they do that through their own
particular system and you can run a name through their system to see whether or not anybody
has actually trademarked the name. If someone's trademarked the name, it's wise of you to
reconsider the name that you want to use and think again about what might be appropriate
for the business. The last place that I have people look would be with the county wherein
they plan to do business. In this particular case, we would go to the County of Orange
and we would search their fictitious business name database to see whether or not anybody
was using that particular name in the county where we wanted to do business.