As you evaluate qualified trademark survey companies for your St. Louis, MO, litigation, consider Keegan & Donato Consulting. Our expertise will have a significant impact on whether the court deems your survey results admissible.
Keegan & Donato Consulting is a specialty research consultancy based in beautiful Rye, New York. Principals Mark Keegan and Tony Donato offer more than 30 years of combined experience and education in consumer-based survey research and data analysis in the context of intellectual property disputes.
The firm’s vast experience includes conducting consumer-based surveys to test a wide variety of Lanham Act claims, such as likelihood of confusion, strength of mark, secondary meaning, acquired distinctiveness, trade dress, and others, false and deceptive advertising, consumer perception, and expert witness testimony on consumer survey, marketing, and economic issues.
Keegan & Donato Consulting provides a complete suite of services, including consulting on litigation strategy for both plaintiff and defendant clients, consumer research studies, expert reports, testimony in trademark and trade dress litigation, testimony at deposition or trial, and rebuttal and critique of opposing parties’ surveys when applicable.
We are members of the International Trademark Association (INTA), the American Marketing Association (AMA), the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), the Association for Consumer Research (ACR), and ESOMAR, the leading global association for market, social and opinion researchers, and are Qualtrics certified.
Why Hire a Survey Expert?
When faced with flawed, poorly designed surveys, courts can be harsh. The evidence may be given little weight or partially or completed excluded.
In Black & Decker Corp. v. Positec USA Inc., 1:11-cv-5426, Dist. Court, N.D. Illinois, Eastern Division (2017), for example, flawed survey evidence resulted in the court tossing out an earlier jury verdict with a $53.9 million award and ordering a new trial.
The court determined that the likelihood of confusion survey proffered by the Plaintiff’s expert was “so informally designed and conducted that it fails key tests of professionalism and reliability” and should have been excluded from trial.
“Even if … the survey was not the sole evidence on likelihood of confusion in the trial record, it was the linchpin of Plaintiffs’ case on likelihood of confusion— an issue that was hotly contested at trial. Given that Plaintiffs presented no evidence that any consumers were confused about the origin of Defendants’ goods, there is a high probability that [the expert’s] flawed testimony unfairly influenced the jury’s verdict… and admission of the survey and [the expert’s] testimony about the survey was fundamentally unfair to Defendants.”
Keegan & Donato Consulting follows survey design, execution, and presentation best practices to avoid these pitfalls and satisfy judicial and adversarial scrutiny. Our consumer surveys direct objective, non-leading questions to an appropriate universe of consumers. We have procedures in place to minimize potential biases in data collection, and our services include a complete analysis and reporting of survey data.
Clients whose litigation requires the support of trademark survey companies in St. Louis, MO, will benefit from the extraordinary expertise of Keegan & Donato Consulting. Call us at (914) 967-9421. We will help you design a reliable, methodologically sound consumer survey to support your case.