An Interview with Ronald D. Coleman

• Author: Lindsay B. Allen
• Position: Lindsay B. Allen practices trademark, copyright, and unfair competition law at Perkins Coie LLP. She can be reached at LAllen@perkinscoie.com.
• Pages: 8-9

Published in Landslide® magazine, Volume 10, Number 3 , a publication of the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law (ABA-IPL), ©2018 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.

Ronald D. Coleman is a partner at Archer Law in New

York City and Hackensack, New Jersey, practicing commer-

cial litigation with a focus on trademark, copyright, and First

Amendment law. He also started the Likelihood of Confu-

sion® blog in 2005 and continues to blog regularly about

trademark, copyright, and free speech. Likelihood of Confu-

sion is one of the most widely read intellectual property law

blogs in the world. His recent successful argument before the

US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, sitting en banc,

and subsequent appearance before the United States Supreme

Court on behalf of his client, Simon Tam of The Slants rock

band, resulted in the Supreme Court striking down a portion

of the Lanham Act on free speech grounds.

Mr. Tam and his Archer team are the 2018 Mark T. Banner

Award honorees and will receive the award during ABA-IPL’s

33rd Annual Intellectual Property Law Conference in April.

How did you rst become interested in intellectual property law?

My mother was a legal secretary for the Cities Service Corpo-

ration, which used to have a technical research center in central

New Jersey, near where we lived. I visited her from time to

time when I was in high school and encountered the old bound

volumes of the Trademark Ofcial Gazette, which I found mes-

merizing. That was my rst experience with trademark law.

How did you get involved in blogging?

I was always someone who liked to read public interest/

public policy-type magazines, but I never felt like I could get

into the conversation, and I did feel like I had something to

say. I studied economics and political science in college and

had been very interested in issues and debate, and it frustrated

me that there were tremendous barriers, it seemed, to getting

into the conversation. Blogs had discussion forums and com-

ments, and you could earn your way into the conversation on

the merits, which I did.

Soon I developed relationships with some of the bloggers

where I was advertising, and one of them encouraged me to

start my own blog a little bit after I started the Coleman Law

Firm. At this point, I had also gotten involved with work-

ing on behalf of bloggers, usually on a pro bono basis, on

free speech issues. These two paths became more and more

intertwined and built on each other, so that in a short time I

was the “go-to guy” in certain pockets of the blogging world

for almost any legal issue faced by bloggers.

I was convinced that if people would nd their way to my

website, it would be a way for clients to nd out about me,

which was, strange as it seems, not all that common for law-

yers in the relatively early days of the Internet.

What do you attribute to the success of your blog? How have

you been able to grow your readership?

Through my law rm website, even before the blog began, I

came to represent a company called S&L Vitamins that was get-

ting cease and desist letters from the companies that made the

Australian Gold and Designer Skin tanning lotions, and a num-

ber of others. These companies ended up going after my client

in a series of “unauthorized distribution” cases throughout the

country premised on trademark infringement. My client threat-

ened these companies’ existing price level and distribution

mechanism, but what my client was doing was completely legal.

We ended up litigating more or less the same case against several

companies over the course of several years around the country.

Several things happened to my practice during the course

of this litigation: I had stepped up my trademark game; I was

able to get more experience doing rst seat trial work, which

I really enjoyed; I was getting the opportunity to litigate all

over the country; and I was experimenting with sharing these

experiences on my blog.

A little bit later, after I had moved my practice to another

rm, one of the bloggers I represented, Bob Cox, ran what was

then a very popular blog called The National Debate. He had

been writing for a while about how frustrated he was that the

New York Times never issued corrections of factual errors that

were contained in op-ed pieces. The Times’ view was that if it

was news, they would make a correction, but if it was an op-ed,

they would not. Bob argued that there were very substantial

errors on the op-ed pages as a result, and the pages themselves

were extremely inuential and it was objectionable in his view.

He put together a parody of the corrections page as he would

imagine it would look like if the New York Times made op-ed

corrections, and posted the parody on his website.

Next thing he knew, he received a DMCA takedown order

for this parody, and he ended up nding me based on my

prior work for other bloggers on a pro bono basis. In return

for my representation, he posted links to my blog to tell his

readers that I was helping him, which raised my online prole

tremendously. We did get the Times to retract its takedown

An Interview with

RonaldD. Coleman,

Likelihood of Confusion® Blog

By Lindsay B. Allen

Lindsay B. Allen practices trademark, copyright, and unfair

competition law at Perkins Coie LLP. She can be reached at

LAllen@perkinscoie.com.

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