Last week, the World Trademark Review (WTR) celebrated the best in-house trademark and legal counsel at its fifth annual industry awards ceremony, held at the beautiful Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. The exclusive event was attended by several hundred of the world's most well-known and well-respected lawyers and trademark professionals -- and individuals and teams from companies like Apple, Coke, Google, Amazon and Microsoft were honored for their important work.

1400 nominations and two months of extensive research later, and .CO found itself nominated by WTR, for the "Internet & Online Services Team of the Year" award, right along side of Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Ebay.

While we didn't win the award, as far as we're concerned, we won big! After all, for a domain registry of barely one year old to be recognized by some of the industry's most respected legal minds for our trademark practices -- and nominated for an award against the likes of Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Ebay -- well, that's just a huge cause for celebration!

Ultimately the award went to Google, for the legal work it has done this year relating to the use of trademark terms as keywords -- and to protect its own trademarks from infringement (including Google and Gmail).

From what we have learned, .CO was nominated for this illustrious award for implementing a host of innovative rights protections for brand owners during the registry's role out -- including being the first domain registry to create and implement a Specially Protected Marks List.

I must say that the sting of losing was immediately softened when a team of about 15 trademark attorneys stood to accept the award on behalf of Google -- and it became clear that the company's TM counsel team is, quite possibly, bigger than our entire company!

The big event of the night was the award for In-house Counsel of the Year, which was won by Amazon.com's Dana Northcott, Senior IP Counsel. Having just closed the deal with Amazon for the acquisition of A.CO, Z.CO, K.CO and Cloud.CO the day prior to the ceremony, we're confident the award was very well deserved - and we congratulate Dana and the entire Amazon team on the award!

Some of the other key awards given were:

Consumer Electronics Team of the Year
Apple

Fashion & Luxury Team of the Year
Limited Brands

Household & Cosmetics Team of the Year
Procter & Gamble

Media & Telecommunications Team of the Year
Sony Ericsson

Technology & Software Team of the Year
Microsoft

You can learn more about the WTR awards here.  If you don't already subscribe to WTR, you may need to sign up for a free account to get access.