Seattle Trademark Lawyer

David Donoguhe’s Chicago IP Litigation Blog features a new decision from the Northern District of Illinois.

The punch line is if you’re a corporate officer, you can’t expect to find protection behind the corporate shield if you were involved in directing your company to infringe a trademark.

That may come as a surprise, but the law’s by no means unique to the Seventh Circuit. A case out of the Central District of California last year summarizes the rule of law in these parts as well:

“An individual who personally directs a corporation in committing trademark infringement, or who personally commits those acts, is personally liable for that infringement.

“This is particularly true when a single individual is the corporation’s sole shareholder, sole officer, and sole manager, and performs the infringing acts himself; that person will be individually liable for the intellectual property infringements committed by the corporation. Such personal liability does not depend on piercing the corporate veil.”

See Partners for Health & Home, L.P. v. Seung Wee Yang, No. 09-07849, 2011 WL 5387075 (C.D. Cal. Oct. 28, 2011).

This means that regardless if you’re at the helm of a big company — or serve as both CEO and chief bottle washer at a small company — you can be personally liable if your firm is on the hook for trademark infringement.

In other words, you personal assets could be at risk. That’s not to mean the sky is falling. It’s just to say that you could have more of a personal interest in how your company’s trademark case turns out than you might have thought.