There’s a scene in the Monty Python film Life of Brian in which Brian tries to join a political group:

BRIAN: Are you the Judean People's Front?
REG: F**k off!
BRIAN: What?
REG: [scoffs] Judean People's Front! We're the People's Front of Judea!

I was reminded of this by a legal dispute in the US over the name of a trade organisation that promises to be more animated than most. The impending case is between two sets of trial lawyers. Battles don’t get more epic or gruesome.

In 2006, America’s largest and most powerful organisation of trial lawyers changed its name from the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA) to the American Association for Justice (AAJ). The reason it gave for the change was that “trial lawyers” was a phase that excited negative connotations.

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Not long afterwards, a group of lawyers formed another organisation to compete with the AAJ and adopted their abandoned name, adding “the” to the title: The American Trial Lawyers Association, or TheATLA for short. A recent membership recruitment letter describes it as an “elite organisation” whose members "exemplify superior qualifications, trial results, leadership, influence, reputation, stature, and profile in the trial attorney community". In other words, they know their way around a court room and you’d want to think twice before suing them.

The AAJ, however, has thought twice and has issued proceedings in Minneapolis in order to force TheATLA to drop the name, arguing that the existence of the old name was confusing AAJ members and infringing a trademark. The claim also demands that AAJ is awarded any money that TheATLA collects in membership dues, and —you guessed it — treble damages and attorneys' fees. The lawyers who argue the case will no doubt be very good: a trial lawyer whose client is composed of 56,000 other trial lawyers can expect some professional feedback.

TheATLA's principal founding member, J. Keith Givens, maintains that AAJ liberated the ownership of its former name when it abandoned it in favour of the AAJ. How this will play in a court will be interesting as American legislation specifies that even if an organisation stops using a title for three years, such nonuse raises only a “rebuttable presumption” that the trademark has been abandoned. That means that the alleged abandoner is free to show that it didn’t in fact give up the title.

If they cannot settle on their own names, perhaps the two groups ought to commission some market research. It wouldn’t be a job for the faint-hearted. Imagine some of the replies you’d get, stopping people in the shopping mall and asking: “What do you call a collection of lawyers?”

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University

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