Does your law office advertise a slogan or vanity phone number on your website or advertising? If you haven’t trademarked it, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise.

I once put “No Fee Guarantee” on my law firm website. Sometime later, I received a letter advising that it was trademarked and that I would have to remove it. Since it was only on my website and not on billboards and TV advertising, it was easy to remove.

Now for the second time, after allegedly abandoning their first claim, Chick-fil-A sent a cease-and-desist letter to Bo Muller-Moore who makes screen printed “Eat More Kale” T-shirts by hand.  Apparently, Chick-fil-A believes that use of the slogan “Eat More Kale” on T-shirts is confusingly similar to their slogan “Eat Mor Chikin” for their restaurants.

Although I think this is legally ridiculous, I don’t think I like to try Chick-fil-A if it tastes like a T-shirt.

In another equally interesting and legally ridiculous claim, the porn company Vivid Entertainment accused Taiwan-based phonemaker, HTC of violating their trademark by marketing their new phone called Vivid.

Once you decide on on the direction of your brand, never forget it and never deviate from it. I noticed two recent examples of brand deviation or destruction by major corporations.

Recently, Domino’s announced that (after 40 years) they discovered their pizza wasn’t good! Can you imagine that? So they reinvented their pizza and recent advertising has focused on nothing but how proud they are of their new taste.

New Year’s Eve was Tavern on the Green’s last night for dinner under its current ownership. Now, after a fight for ownership rights of the brand, a Manhattan federal judge will decide who gets to keep the name Tavern on the Green, valued at $19 million. That makes the brand worth 50% of annual gross receipts of $38 million. ^{1 2}

While a name like Tavern on the Green has tremendous value as a brand that draws people to the restaurant, lawyers are in a different situation with two distinct differences.

Brand fraud online is increasing and law firms are not immune.

CMO COUNCIL reported that “A global audit of 306 marketers, sponsored by MarkMonitor, a leading provider of solutions for enterprise brand protection, found that trademark trespassing is moving increasingly online, and fraud is becoming more difficult to identify due to the increased sophistication of brand hijackers.”

For quite a while, e-mails have circulated which purport to come from a law firm or in some illegal way use the name of a law firm to perpetuate a fraudulent scheme. A search on Google came up with a myriad of complaints about schemes involving the name of a law firm.