trademark law firm loses trademark lawsuit

LegalForce RAPC Worldwide P.C. v. MH Sub I, LLC, No. C24-00669 WHA, 2025 WL 3675365 (N.D. Cal. Dec. 18, 2025)

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

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

LegalForce uses a composite mark with a parallelogramcolored orange, with two rounded corners and two sharp, with LF inside and thestylized words “Legal Force” alongside. The composite is registered for “lawfirm services” as well as services “providing general information in the fieldof legal services via a global computer network.” Sometimes, LegalForce usesjust the symbol portion, and it registered that separately in anticipation ofthis litigation. (Note: “Plaintiff failed to submit certified copies of theabove registrations before our October 2025 bench trial and had no acceptableexcuse for the failure. Instead, plaintiff … submitted certified copies afterthe trial record closed.… This is emblematic of the way plaintiff hasprosecuted this entire case. Nevertheless, this order will treat thecertificates as having been proven.”)

Composite mark symbol only

MH isn’t a law firm, but offers referrals. “People havinglegal problems have been attracted by advertising to www.lawfirms.com, wheresome have filled out an interest form. Defendant has packaged the resultingclient ‘leads’ and provided them to paying lawyers, including lawyers listed ononline directories defendant also owns,” including avvo.com. Lawfirms.com initiallyused a mark that also had an orange parallelogram with two sharp comers; nestedinside 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’ssuggestion trying to spare both sides the cost of litigation, MH changed thesymbol to crimson and changed the corners so that the tops were sharp and thebottoms rounded. The column and stylized word remained.

replacement mark

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

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

Both parties have used keyword marketing but “no single websearch has returned or will ever likely return both plaintiff’s and defendant’swebsites showing their marks.” There was no evidence that the parties have orwould bid on the same keywords for the websites at issue (as opposed to othersites like avvo.com). For SEO, there was “no credible evidence that defendanthas undertaken any effort to appear in search results for the same searches asplaintiff, or ever would…. No credible evidence showed even that the servicenames have appeared alongside each other.” Likewise, “no credible evidenceproved 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 socialmedia, but not on the same social media platforms. LF used its symbol onLinkedIn, but “LawFirms.com,” unlike LF, does not target businesspeople. “It isnot the service name of a standalone business with its own employees.” Instead,defendant markets on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, where there was noevidence of LF having marketed. There was no evidence that MH marketed or wouldmarket at any conference or physical location. “LegalForce and LawFirms.com arenot marketed in the same places in part because they do not offer the sameservices.”

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

Meanwhile, LF has never provided legal services for personalinjury, employment issues, or family law, received any appreciable number ofinquiries from any persons seeking any such services, or systematically madereferrals of any kind to any other lawyers or law firms. Although it asserted anintent to do the first and third of these, the court found this not credible. “Plaintiffhas had more than a decade to broaden its legal practice and/or to begin makingreferrals systematically to other lawyers and it has failed to do either.”

The customers are moderately careful: “They are morementally alert than someone grabbing a lemon-lime soda. They would not belikely 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 lessexpensive trademark registration services, “suggesting but expressly notconcluding that they may be relatively less sophisticated and take relativelyless care,” relatively less care was not no care — “especially if beingcompared to the care taken for more expensive legal services.” “Protecting abusiness’s reputation is important, even if it is on average more important tobe made whole after the kind of bodily injury that prompts a person to seek alawyer.”

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

Conceptually, LF’s marks “comprise common features arrangedin a common way, with limited distinctions.” A squat parallelogram with somerounded corners and some unrounded ones is “shared by other marks in commerce.”There were many other orange parallelograms already in use, although thegradient added a slight distinction. Bolding one but not both words “distinguishedthe 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, butrather “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 toride plaintiff’s coattails, nor even to step on them: Plaintiff’s marks werenot well known. Plaintiff and Defendant were not proximate or expanding.” MHchose a squat parallelogram “because it presented well on websites inconjunction with words.” It chose its colors, fonts, and stylings to complementone of its existing logos (Avvo blue): “designers treat those colors ascomplementary.” MH then chose the sizing and stacking to match its existinglogos, so that its mark could be configured to appear clearly at the top of itswebsite.

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

Nor were the parties’ marks very similar. The columndistinguished them; the initials “LF” do not suggest the same thing as theRoman column. While each set of letters in the words includes the capitalizedletters L and F, they spelled different words. The senior mark bolds only thefirst word, “Legal,” but not the second, “Force,” while the junior mark boldsboth 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 awhole, they were arranged in a “common, functional” way for a mark designed to bedisplayed at the top of a web page. “No credible evidence proved that whenviewing the marks as a whole this horizontal stacking itself was important toany consumer impression or to any association with any service.” Indeed, “thedifferences stood out in the overall consumer impression.”

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

“The survey question posed a scenario that was not specificand that did not reflect any scenario proven to exist or to be likely to existin commerce.” It didn’t even show what the websites would look like. There wasno control. (Indeed, LF ran a survey with a control, showing no real differencebetween 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 there-crafted survey.” The questions “incorporated false premises, wereambiguously worded, and/or were reported to the Court with at first materialomissions.”

Defendant’s better survey showed consumers the junior markon 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 theymight recall and then write in. “No one responded with LegalForce, Trademarkia,Raj Abhyanker, or anything similar. This survey was run with likely consumersof plaintiff’s services and with likely consumers of defendant’s services. Theanswer was zero for either cohort.”

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

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