IN THIS INDUSTRY
Food and Beverage
Schiff Hardin understands the challenges facing clients in the highly competitive food and beverage industry. Bringing expertise in various areas of law — such as intellectual property, litigation, franchising and distribution, advertising, labor and employment, and mergers and acquisitions — our attorneys help restaurants, food manufacturers, dairy businesses and other food and beverage industry clients to protect and grow their brands.
Our attorneys have litigated successfully for a wide range of copyrighted phrases and trademarks in the industry. We work hard to protect a client's design patent and trade dress rights, as evidenced by our successful representation of a manufacturer of an industry-leading travel tumbler in a case against a nationwide chain of gourmet coffee stores and its supplier of vacuum-insulated beverage containers offered for sale in its stores. We have also successfully prosecuted cases involving disputes among food and beverage producer/marketers and their distributors. In one such case we were retained to challenge a state law that was enacted to protect a politically influential beverage distributor from termination or other penalties for poor performance. We persuaded a federal court to strike the law down under the "contracts clause" of the U.S. Constitution, whereupon the state legislature repealed the law.
Having successfully developed the trade secrets doctrine of "inevitable disclosure" in the milestone case of PepsiCo, Inc. v. Redmond et al., 54 F 3d. 1262 (7th Cir. 1995), our trade secrets lawyers have continued to counsel clients and to litigate, when necessary, on cutting edge trade secrets issues and applications in the food and beverage industry. For example, our lawyers took the "inevitable disclosure" doctrine into new territory — the advertising industry — in the service of PepsiCo brands. When a major advertising agency that had recently worked on advertising for premier PepsiCo brands Gatorade and Aquafina announced plans to take on two directly competing brands of Pepsi's major competitor, we filed separate injunction actions to prevent the same creative personnel at the agency from working on the new, directly competitive brands. After we won a fast moving, hotly contested restraining order preventing the competitor's personnel from meeting with the agency regarding the competitor's bottled water product, the agency consented to the entry of injunctive relief requiring the agency's abstention from handling brands competing with both Gatorade and Aquafina for a prescribed time period.
Similarly, our patent trial lawyers have enjoyed success in litigation involving patented food industry products ranging from stuffed pizza crust and sausage topping to high quality cookware. We also have experience in policing and enforcing popular and well-known trademarks such as Thermos® and Sterno®. Schiff Hardin lawyers know the food and beverage business and relish its challenges.
Our attorneys perform the following services for our food and beverage industry clients:
