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Friday the 13th Not So Hot for Lexis
Reed Elsevier Plc, owner LexisNexis, today lost a case that denied it the ability to trademark the phrase “lawyers.com” for its Martindale-Hubbell online legal information service.
Martindale-Hubbell had run the Web site for nine years, and was seeking to protect the lawyers.com mark to prevent others from trading on the brand.
The decision is fairly brief – and contains the nicely barbed line:
“For better or worse, lawyers are necessarily an integral part of the information exchange about legal services,”
It continued:
information exchange about lawyers is not at all discrete from information exchange about the law, legal news, and legal services.
The mark is over, but the URL lingers on.
Whew! I’m thinking it’s good that we didn’t name this blog LAW.ca! Saved by an S.
YesS!
‘s wonderful, ‘s marvelous