How to Deal with Threatening Legal Letters

Want to know how to handle nasty legal demands?

I’m on the road in between meetings today and just thought I’d share a story with you. I was speaking to a friend earlier and they said, “Oh, that’s such a great story. More people should know it.” So I thought I’d share it with you today.

We had a client who received one of those nasty letters of demand in the mail saying, “You’re in breach of our trade mark. Hand over your domain name, hand over your website. If you don’t do it in 24 hours or seven days or something ridiculous, then we’re going to take you to court and see you for a whole bunch of money.“

Now the client came to us and said, “Can you represent me in court proceedings?” I responded, “Hey, let’s stop and look at this in the moment and see if that is your only option.“

Court is not the only option

When we looked at the value in the client’s business, it was not in the trade mark. This is a client who had been selling a product that they imported from the UK and the company in the UK had registered the trade mark in the UK. There was a competing company in the US and they had registered the trade mark in the US. The American company came to Australia. They registered the trade mark in Australia. They waited a couple of years and then they wrote this nasty letter to our client saying, “You’re in breach of our trademark.” Our client had been trading in Australia before they started trading in Australia.

There are a whole lot of legal, technical arguments involved. We could’ve gone to court. We could have argued prior use and all sorts of things, but court proceedings take time and cost money. So the prospect of our client going to court was just not attractive. We were looking at maybe three years, $150,000 and no guarantee of a favourable result. We would have a result one way or the other, but we couldn’t guarantee it would help our client.

Looking at the business and knowing that the revenue wasn’t in the trade mark, we spoke to the supplier in the UK. They were happy to re-brand or they were already in the process of re-branding some of their products. So they said, “Okay, what we’ll do is we will assist you in re-branding.” They registered a domain name with the new brand. They registered the new brand as a trade mark here in Australia. Our client put together a 90 day plan, or at least we helped our client put together a 90 day plan to re-brand their business and to shift everything across to the new brand.

Because it was a 90 day plan and we made some promises to the American company about the process we were going to go through, they gave us that time because 90 days is a hell of a lot better than going through court, and there are certain requirements and rules around proper negotiation and all that sort of thing and trying to reach a commercial resolution. So the American company just had to wait.

Is there a better strategy?

In that 90 days, our client shifted his entire business onto the new brand. Now the value was in his database, so through a series of communications with the database, the whole database was shifted across to the new brand.

Our client did have to spend money on re-branding and shifting that database across, but he didn’t lose any revenue and most importantly didn’t lose any business. So once that process was complete, our client had a new website up. He had the entire database marketing to them and was changing them over to the new brand. We’ve got an agreement with the American company to say that we could sell out the end of the branded supply and not stock any new supply with that trade mark.

In the end, the American company bought our client’s domain name. Now, the reason behind that was the domain name was .com which means it can be used internationally, so my client still had the right to use that domain name in jurisdictions other than where there was a registered trade mark, or where he had permission. So he could still use it in the UK where they had the mark registered or his supplier had the registered trade mark and was happy for him to use it. In order for the American company to get hold of that domain, they had to buy it.

Instead of three years and $150,000 in court with no certain result, what we did is introduced a strategy enabling our client to re-brand in 90 days, shift his business across, not lose any money, and because the domain name was bought, his legal fees were effectively halved. So great, great result for the client, and just a really good example of the fact that there are options. Our client walked away with a stronger business and a protected brand.

• Don’t think just because you get a letter of demand that you have no choice but to go to court.
• Don’t think that you might not have an argument because there’s a whole lot of technical issues involved in legal cases, and sometimes it’s not all against you and sometimes there’s not all in your favour.
• There are options and it’s worth investigating what those options are before you go and get started.