If you are looking for trademark survey companies with strategic and analytical skills that can help you strengthen your Indianapolis case strategy, Keegan & Donato Consulting offers the expertise and data-gathering capabilities you need.

Keegan & Donato Consulting is a specialty research consultancy and one of the most experienced firms in the field of trademark litigation.  We utilize classic survey designs in addition to innovative custom designs to meet our clients’ needs.

Principals Mark Keegan and Tony Donato have decades of experience in consumer surveys in the context of intellectual property disputes, and have worked with many well-known firms from coast to coast, including Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP in Los Angeles, Reed Smith LLP in Chicago. Riemer & Braunstein LLP in Boston, and Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in New York.

The firm specializes in a wide range of trademark and trade-dress analyses and surveys, including:

• Likelihood of Confusion
• Strength of Mark
• Secondary Meaning
• Acquired Distinctiveness
• Lanham Act Claims
• Survey Critiques and Rebuttals

Keegan & Donato Consulting can provide you with technical and strategic advice; help you analyze the economic, financial and/or technical complexities of your case; help you determine suitable deposition questions to ask; help you prepare a testifying expert for deposition and trial; or critique the potential weaknesses in an adversary’s survey evidence in a rebuttal report.

Value of Hiring a Trademark Survey Expert

Survey evidence can be a persuasive component of your overall case strategy but continue to receive the critical attention of the courts and may be given little weight or excluded from evidence if poorly designed.

It is crucial to employ experienced survey experts, such as Keegan & Donato Consulting, who can document and support the choice of questions, select the right universe and sample, minimize the possibility or appearance of bias, and accurately report the data gathered.

To demonstrate the importance of hiring qualified survey experts in support of your case, consider Valador, Inc v. HTC Corporation, Case No. 1:16-cv-1162, Dist. Court, E.D. Virginia (2017).

The plaintiff in this trademark dispute, Valador, alleged that the defendants infringed on its registered mark, “VIVE,” used in connection with the sale of its software, with a headset the defendants called the “HTC Vive.”

To support its likelihood of confusion claim, the plaintiff hired an expert to conduct a survey. The defendants filed a motion to exclude the survey testimony on the basis that the expert was unqualified and used unreliable survey methods and principles to reach his conclusions.

The court granted the defendant’s motion and determined that the plaintiff’s expert “was not qualified to design a survey or to interpret survey results” because he “lacked the necessary experience with trademark infringement claims.”

The survey results were deemed inadmissible because they “(1) failed to evaluate the proper universe of respondents, (2) did not replicate market conditions, (3) neglected to use a control group, (4) eschewed the recognized methodologies for conducting trademark confusion surveys, and (5) asked improperly leading questions. These fundamental flaws, taken together, render the survey so unreliable as to be inadmissible.”

As you evaluate trademark survey companies to assist you with litigation in Indianapolis or elsewhere in the nation, consider a firm like Keegan & Donato Consulting that can deliver persuasive survey evidence which will stand up to judicial scrutiny. Contact us at (914) 967-9421 to learn more about our successful track record.