trademark law firm loses trademark lawsuit

LegalForce RAPC Worldwide P.C. v. MH Sub I, LLC, No. C 24-00669 WHA, 2025 WL 3675365 (N.D. Cal. Dec. 18, 2025)

LegalForce, a law firm “specializing in trademark law,” sued online referrer to law firms MH for infringing two service marks. The court ruled for MH after a bench trial. CEO Raj Abhyanker served as trial counsel, reminding me of the old adage about an attorney who serves as his own lawyer.

LegalForce uses the service name LegalForce and legalforce.com, and owns a search engine for trademarks that primarily has used the service name Trademarkia and the website trademarkia.com. “The search engine has attracted visitors looking for trademarks and has converted some into paying clients for the law firm.”

LegalForce uses a composite mark with a parallelogram colored orange, with two rounded corners and two sharp, with LF inside and the stylized words “Legal Force” alongside. The composite is registered for “law firm services” as well as services “providing general information in the field of legal services via a global computer network.” Sometimes, LegalForce uses just the symbol portion, and it registered that separately in anticipation of this litigation. (Note: “Plaintiff failed to submit certified copies of the above registrations before our October 2025 bench trial and had no acceptable excuse for the failure. Instead, plaintiff … submitted certified copies after the trial record closed.… This is emblematic of the way plaintiff has prosecuted this entire case. Nevertheless, this order will treat the certificates as having been proven.”)

Composite mark

symbol only

MH isn’t a law firm, but offers referrals. “People having legal problems have been attracted by advertising to www.lawfirms.com, where some have filled out an interest form. Defendant has packaged the resulting client ‘leads’ and provided them to paying lawyers, including lawyers listed on online directories defendant also owns,” including avvo.com. Lawfirms.com initially used a mark that also had an orange parallelogram with two sharp comers; nested inside was a white Roman column. A stylized word to the right read: “LawFirms.com.”

accused mark

Soon after litigation began, and consistent with the court’s suggestion trying to spare both sides the cost of litigation, MH changed the symbol to crimson and changed the corners so that the tops were sharp and the bottoms rounded. The column and stylized word remained.

replacement mark

LF continued the case, seeking only injunctive relief as to the original composite.

There was no evidence of actual confusion. MH didn’t market its services using the composite mark in the same places where LF markets its services using either of its marks, “so there has been and will be no occasion for consumers to see both services’ marks and to confuse one versus the other.”

Both parties have used keyword marketing but “no single web search has returned or will ever likely return both plaintiff’s and defendant’s websites showing their marks.” There was no evidence that the parties have or would bid on the same keywords for the websites at issue (as opposed to other sites like avvo.com). For SEO, there was “no credible evidence that defendant has undertaken any effort to appear in search results for the same searches as plaintiff, or ever would…. No credible evidence showed even that the service names have appeared alongside each other.” Likewise, “no credible evidence proved that anything about the websites themselves was confusing.”

At trial, LF offered a theory of AI chatbot confusion. However, it offered no admissible evidence in support of such a theory.

The parties have used the service marks at issue in social media, but not on the same social media platforms. LF used its symbol on LinkedIn, but “LawFirms.com,” unlike LF, does not target businesspeople. “It is not the service name of a standalone business with its own employees.” Instead, defendant markets on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, where there was no evidence of LF having marketed. There was no evidence that MH marketed or would market at any conference or physical location. “LegalForce and LawFirms.com are not marketed in the same places in part because they do not offer the same services.”

There wasn’t even evidence that prospective lawyers buying MH referrals would see the accused mark. While avvo.com has listed some trademark lawyers, lawfirms.com “almost always has attracted and referred individuals having personal problems”: car accidents, worker’s compensation, and divorce. “It has presented all comers with a general webform. Some (very few) who have completed the form have indicated in it that they had trademark needs.” Revenue for each personal injury lead has been about $85, while revenue for each trademark lead has been about $46. For all the relevant periods, lawfirms.com collected and distributed fewer than 25 total trademark leads to trademark lawyers, representing less than $1,000 in revenues, a small fraction of all leads and revenue, and none of those came during the period when it used the accused mark.  

Meanwhile, LF has never provided legal services for personal injury, employment issues, or family law, received any appreciable number of inquiries from any persons seeking any such services, or systematically made referrals of any kind to any other lawyers or law firms. Although it asserted an intent to do the first and third of these, the court found this not credible. “Plaintiff has had more than a decade to broaden its legal practice and/or to begin making referrals systematically to other lawyers and it has failed to do either.”

The customers are moderately careful: “They are more mentally alert than someone grabbing a lemon-lime soda. They would not be likely to confuse the two marks even if the marks were seen side by side.” Although one of plaintiff’s experts testified that LF offered relatively less expensive trademark registration services, “suggesting but expressly not concluding that they may be relatively less sophisticated and take relatively less care,” relatively less care was not no care — “especially if being compared to the care taken for more expensive legal services.” “Protecting a business’s reputation is important, even if it is on average more important to be made whole after the kind of bodily injury that prompts a person to seek a lawyer.”

The senior marks weren’t strong, despite the composite mark’s incontestability. LF had “barely” used the two marks at issue, focusing instead on “Trademarkia,” including in the header for legalforce.com. There was no credible testimony or documentary evidence of any paid advertisement using LF’s “LegalForce” service name or marks. LF did not even prove that its own law firm clients know the name “LegalForce.”

Conceptually, LF’s marks “comprise common features arranged in a common way, with limited distinctions.” A squat parallelogram with some rounded corners and some unrounded ones is “shared by other marks in commerce.” There were many other orange parallelograms already in use, although the gradient added a slight distinction. Bolding one but not both words “distinguished the stylings from other marks somewhat.” The choice of a “horizontal stack” with the symbol on the left and the word on the right was not arbitrary, but rather “a common and functional choice to fit well at the top of a website.” Thus, there was neither commercial nor conceptual strength.

There was no intent to confuse: “Defendant had no reason to ride plaintiff’s coattails, nor even to step on them: Plaintiff’s marks were not well known. Plaintiff and Defendant were not proximate or expanding.” MH chose a squat parallelogram “because it presented well on websites in conjunction with words.” It chose its colors, fonts, and stylings to complement one of its existing logos (Avvo blue): “designers treat those colors as complementary.” MH then chose the sizing and stacking to match its existing logos, so that its mark could be configured to appear clearly at the top of its website.

“The worst that could be said was that defendant neglected to do a trademark search before settling on a mark that assembled common elements in a common way. … The failure to conduct a trademark search before selecting the original mark did not result from bad faith. A trademark search was not required by law.”

Nor were the parties’ marks very similar. The column distinguished them; the initials “LF” do not suggest the same thing as the Roman column. While each set of letters in the words includes the capitalized letters L and F, they spelled different words. The senior mark bolds only the first word, “Legal,” but not the second, “Force,” while the junior mark bolds both words “LawFirms.” “In meaning, the senior mark describes one legal force, while the junior mark uses the generic term for many or all law firms.” As a whole, they were arranged in a “common, functional” way for a mark designed to be displayed at the top of a web page. “No credible evidence proved that when viewing the marks as a whole this horizontal stacking itself was important to any consumer impression or to any association with any service.” Indeed, “the differences stood out in the overall consumer impression.”

LF’s survey showed respondents ead-to-head comparisons of the composites and asked: “If you saw the logos [below] on two different websites [whe]n searching for law firms, would you think they are connected, affiliated, or associated in any way?” Thirteen percent answered “Yes.” Nineteen percent said “maybe.” (The expert initially grouped these together as 32%; the court was not pleased.)

“The survey question posed a scenario that was not specific and that did not reflect any scenario proven to exist or to be likely to exist in commerce.” It didn’t even show what the websites would look like. There was no control. (Indeed, LF ran a survey with a control, showing no real difference between the test and control cells, so it dropped the control and re-ran the survey; “[o]ther methods to reduce bias were known to plaintiff but not followed in the re-crafted survey.” The questions “incorporated false premises, were ambiguously worded, and/or were reported to the Court with at first material omissions.”

Defendant’s better survey showed consumers the junior mark on lawfirms.com, then asked if they believed the services were put out by, affiliated with, or approved by some other business, whose marks or name they might recall and then write in. “No one responded with LegalForce, Trademarkia, Raj Abhyanker, or anything similar. This survey was run with likely consumers of plaintiff’s services and with likely consumers of defendant’s services. The answer was zero for either cohort.”

The court had other criticisms of Abhyanker in his roles as CEO and trial counsel. E.g., he “testified misleadingly under oath to having spent $10 million advertising the mark. On cross-examination it was revealed that zero of that $10 million had been spent buying ads showing the actual marks at issue.” On the other hand, the court found that discovery was “marked by failures by counsel on both sides.”

The only legal conclusion of note is the court’s recognition that incontestability doesn’t add actual market strength. “[E]ven if incontestable, a mark that remains conceptually and commercially weak cannot be asserted to exclude from its designated market other trademarks that are unlikely to be confused with it.”