Seattle Trademark Lawyer

Yesterday, Prof. Kenneth Port of William Mitchell College of Law unveiled the online, searchable Mitchell Study on Trademark Litigation. Here’s how he describes it:

“In this study I compile and report on all 2,762 reported cases under the Lanham Act since its inception in 1947 that terminated a trademark law suit. The Study itself is searchable by case name, court, and ultimate result. You can also get a list, for example, of all suits in the last 60 years where the Federal Trademark Dilution Act was a significant claim. To view this Study, you must download Google Chrome browser as the Study is over 40,000 lines of code. Explorer and Firefox do not work well.

“At this web site, you will see graphs of the results of all cases. For example, you can see the comparison of trademark cases by circuit, the results, and damage amounts. It was very surprising to see that although the 2nd Circuit is a popular forum for trademark cases, the average results were not favorable to the plaintiff. The 11th Circuit is the big winner on damage amounts by Circuit.

“Going forward, this study will be updated on an annual basis. William Mitchell College of Law has invested more than 4,000 work hours to get this done. It is provided for no fee. It is intended to be used as a basis for other research and analysis. If you use it, please just credit our IP Institute.”

The database is powerful. Prof. Port put it to use in this law review article positing that trademark owners have used litigation to their competitive advantage, a phenomenon he calls “trademark extortion.” The article draws heavily from the Mitchell Study.

The Mitchell Study also has its limitations. For example, it is limited to “reported” (which I take to mean “published”) decisions through December 31, 2007, that “dispositively and terminally adjudicated a trademark claim.” Interestingly, the Study’s methodology states 2,762 Lanham Act cases meet these criteria. However, these criteria would not seem to capture “unpublished” cases, trademark cases that settled or otherwise were not “dispositively and terminally adjudicated,” or cases that were decided after December 31, 2007. The Study shows that only six cases in the Western District meet these criteria, the most recent of which were decided in 2003.

Like the Stanford IP Litigation Clearinghouse (which STL discussed here and here), the Study is an ambitious project. It gives practitioners, academics, and the public access to organized information about trademark cases — all free of charge courtesy from a professor and law school that spent more than 4,000 hours developing it.

It’s nothing short of exciting that these resources are becoming available.