Some meetings are good. Some are great. And some — like this month’s Three-Inn Meeting — are the kind of evening that reminds you exactly why you joined the Inn in the first place.
This March, the Seattle Intellectual Property American Inn of Court joined forces with two of our regional counterparts — the William L. Dwyer American Inn of Court and the Hon. Robert J. Bryan American Inn of Court — for a collaborative gathering built around one of the most dynamic and consequential areas in modern IP practice: trademark law and the fight against counterfeiting. The evening drew practitioners from across all three Inns for a CLE program that was equal parts substantive, timely, and genuinely illuminating.
Why Three Inns?
The Three-Inn Meeting format is one of the most distinctive events on the Inn calendar — a rare opportunity to bring together practitioners from different professional communities around a shared topic of mutual interest. When three Inns align on a subject as rich and rapidly evolving as trademark enforcement and counterfeiting, the result is a room full of diverse perspectives, practitioners at every career stage, and the kind of cross-pollination of ideas that makes for truly excellent programming.
This month’s event did not disappoint.
The Program: From Fundamentals to the Front Lines
The evening opened with a presentation on trademark fundamentals — a grounding in the doctrinal principles that underpin brand protection in the United States. The presentation traced the legal architecture of trademark law before turning to the modern enforcement challenges that have transformed what it means to protect a brand in the digital age.
From there, the program moved into the areas that generated the most discussion: online enforcement, platform accountability, and consumer safety. These topics sit at the intersection of trademark law and the realities of e-commerce, and they raise questions that courts, regulators, brand owners, and platforms are actively working through in real time.
Key themes from the presentation included:
- Online Enforcement — How brand owners detect, document, and pursue counterfeit listings across major e-commerce platforms, and the legal tools available to them under the Lanham Act and beyond.
- Platform Accountability — The evolving responsibilities of online marketplaces to address counterfeit goods on their platforms, including voluntary brand protection programs, notice-and-takedown procedures, and the emerging legal and regulatory pressure to do more.
- Consumer Safety — The underappreciated human cost of counterfeiting. Counterfeit goods are not merely a brand problem — they pose real risks to consumers who unknowingly purchase fake electronics, pharmaceuticals, children’s products, and safety equipment. The presentation made clear that trademark enforcement is, at its core, a consumer protection issue.
The Panel: Practitioners on the Front Lines
The presentation was followed by a panel discussion that brought the material to life in a way only practitioner perspectives can. The panel featured in-house counsel from Amazon and The Pokémon Company, offering contrasting but complementary vantage points on the counterfeiting challenge — one from the world’s largest e-commerce platform navigating its responsibilities as an online marketplace, and one from a globally recognized brand defending its intellectual property against an extraordinary volume of infringement activity worldwide.
The panel also included a professor from the University of Washington School of Law with expertise in the intersection of intellectual property, business, and commercial law, who offered academic grounding and a broader policy perspective on the questions practitioners grapple with daily.
Together, the panelists explored:
- How brand owners and platforms build collaborative relationships around enforcement — and where tensions remain.
- What brand owners can realistically expect from platform enforcement programs, and how to work within them effectively.
- The role of data, technology, and AI-powered tools in identifying and acting on counterfeit listings at scale.
- The policy and legal landscape around platform liability and what changes — legislative or judicial — may be on the horizon.
The Value of Collaboration
What made this evening particularly valuable was not just the quality of the content — it was the people in the room. Bringing together three Inns meant bringing together a broader cross-section of the Pacific Northwest IP legal community: litigators and transactional lawyers, in-house and outside counsel, law students and sitting judges. The questions from the floor reflected that diversity, and the conversation that followed the panel extended well into the networking reception.
That is what the Inn model is built for.
Trademark law is evolving faster than perhaps any other area of IP practice, driven by the explosive growth of e-commerce, the sophistication of counterfeiters, and the increasing expectations placed on platforms that serve as the primary marketplace for global commerce. Events like this month’s Three-Inn Meeting ensure that our members are not just watching that evolution from a distance — they are engaged in it, informed about it, and prepared to counsel clients through it.
Thank you to our colleagues at the William L. Dwyer Inn and the Hon. Robert J. Bryan Inn for joining us, and to our panelists for a conversation that was as practical as it was thought-provoking.
We look forward to seeing you at our next meeting.