Trademarks are pretty straightforward - pretty sure the majority of trademark claims don’t go to court. Even our little 5-person company dealt with both sides of them: a claim against us and claims against others. There’s typically not that much to debate in court. In the claim against us, we had to change the name of a product, there was no point in going to court.

Patents need more money, but all the externally funded startups I’ve worked at had the money for that - investors consider them important.