When you are facing an opponent’s survey in a trademark or Lanham Act case, you need rebuttal survey design attorneys can rely on, not just a few technical nitpicks. The court sees a polished report, clean charts, and a confident survey expert on the other side. Your job is to make a rebuttal and show, in a clear and grounded way, why that survey does not say what the opponent claims it does.

Keegan & Donato Consulting focuses exactly on that problem. With about 40 years of combined experience designing, executing, and critiquing consumer surveys in litigation, their survey experts help attorneys turn shaky survey work into a liability for the opponent rather than a threat to your case.

Why Rebuttal Survey Design Is Its Own Discipline

Rebutting consumer survey evidence is not the same thing as running your own confusion survey and hoping the court likes your results better. A strong rebuttal strategy starts with a different goal.

Keegan & Donato’s role is to:

• Review the opponent’s methodology and data with a litigation-focused lens.
• Identify flaws that affect validity, reliability, or relevance.
• Explain those flaws in a way judges and juries can understand.

The burden is not to show what a perfect survey would have looked like. Instead, it is to point out where the opponent’s survey expert went wrong. Sometimes that includes mentioning alternative approaches that would have avoided the problem. However, there is no obligation to redesign the opponent’s survey from scratch.

Grounding Rebuttal Work in the Legal Issues

Rebuttal survey design also has to start with the law, not just the data tables. For intellectual property and advertising disputes, Keegan & Donato regularly works on:

• Likelihood of confusion
• Strength of mark
• Secondary meaning and acquired distinctiveness
• Trade dress and product design
• Lanham Act consumer perception and understanding

A rebuttal report connects each methodological critique back to these issues.

For example, if the universe does not match likely purchasers, that is not just a technical point. It means the survey does not actually answer the confusion question the court needs to decide.

Key Elements of Rebuttal Survey Design Attorneys Can Trust

When Keegan & Donato designs a rebuttal survey or frames a critique, they focus on the same core elements that drive their own litigation surveys.

Universe and Screening

A rebuttal starts by asking if the opponent actually surveyed likely purchasers. If the universe definition is too broad, too narrow, or simply wrong for the category, that becomes a central theme.

Marketplace Proximity and Stimuli

Next comes context. Did respondents see the marks within marketplace proximity, or in a way that exaggerates or suppresses confusion?

The goal is to show how the opponent’s choices may skew results rather than reflect how likely purchasers actually experience the brands.

Questions, Controls, and Data Handling

From there, the analysis moves into the guts of the survey:

• Are questions neutral, or do they hint that respondents should look for a connection or sponsorship?
• Do the controls match the survey’s purpose, or do they fail to address the key variables?
• How were “don’t know” or “none” responses treated?
• Were any respondents improperly excluded or included in the final counts?

By walking through these issues, Keegan & Donato’s survey experts help the court see that a survey can look impressive on the surface while hiding serious weaknesses underneath.

Turning Opponent Surveys Into an Opportunity

In the end, rebuttal survey design attorneys can rely on transforming an opponent’s survey from a risk into an opportunity. If you are confronting survey evidence in a trademark, trade dress, or Lanham Act case and need experienced survey experts to help design rebuttal strategies and critique the opponent’s work, Keegan & Donato can help. To discuss your matter or schedule a call about rebuttal survey design attorneys can rely on, contact the firm at (914) 967-9421 or reach out online to schedule a call.