Found this interesting, especially the billing.
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Originally published March 20, 2010 at 10:00 PM | Page modified March 22, 2010 at 9:42 AM
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Sunday Buzz
Do WaMu logo and trademarks have value?
WaMu, mired in Chapter 11, pursues trademark and domain-name protections — even in Canada and Mexico. Also: construction drought idles Seattle's neighborhood design-review boards.
By Rami Grunbaum, deputy business editor, and Seattle Times staff
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TED S. WARREN / AP
The bank may be gone, but the fight over WaMu's logo and trademark goes on.
Washington Mutual's logo was pulled down last year from thousands of bank branches across the United States.
But Seattle law firm Perkins Coie is still pressing to win trademark protection for it in Canada and Mexico.
Customers, employees, stockholders and creditors all might think the value of that logo was severely tarnished — if not vaporized — when WaMu became the nation's largest bank failure and its Washington Mutual Inc. holding company fell into bankruptcy.
Yet even in Chapter 11, the company and its local law firm have kept up a surprisingly wide-ranging effort to protect and expand its intellectual-property rights.
This year Perkins Coie, on behalf of Washington Mutual, filed for trademarks on such lines as "The card that rewards you and your pet" and "Your Pet. Your Card. Perfect Together," according to billing records in the bankruptcy. Last fall it sought protection for the much mocked phrase that WaMu introduced not long before its September 2008 demise (and takeover by Chase): "Whoo Hoo."
Perkins Coie has also challenged other companies' trademarks, causing some hard feelings.
"I guess attorneys need to create work," says John Santarpia, CEO of Magnify Credit Union in Lakeland, Fla., a three-branch operation that wants to trademark the slogan "Simplify banking. Magnify life."
Perkins Coie opposed the trademark, arguing it's too similar to a phrase WaMu claims: "Simpler banking. More smiles."
"Not even close, but anyway, that's the world of corporate finance, where attorneys make money, including the attorney I had to hire," Santarpia fumes.
The payoff for the zeal of WaMu's attorneys remains uncertain. Last fall WaMu told the court it expects to get less than $1.5 million for its "non-core" intellectual property: trademarks and domain names that don't mention Washington Mutual or WaMu.
Those 400-plus domain names include obvious ones (friendofthefamily.com, tied to WaMu's old slogan), strategic ones (providiansucks.com, to lock up a reference to WaMu's credit-card company so no one else could use it), and completely inexplicable ones (percivalsluxurymonocles.com). The approximately 135 non-core trademarks range from "The power of yes" to "America's lending leader."
Meanwhile, billings for the IP work are adding up. According to a filing this past week in Delaware bankruptcy court, a top intellectual-property attorney with an hourly rate of $615 was the highest-billing Perkins Coie lawyer working on WaMu affairs in January.
Work related to disposing of the intellectual-property assets represented nearly half of the $65,575 Perkins billed for its January services to WaMu.
In all, the firm has billed Washington Mutual more than $1.5 million since the bankruptcy for a range of services involving everything from regulatory filings to employee benefits and business litigation.
Of course, that looks like chump change alongside the tab for Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, which billed WaMu $549,691 for January alone. Akin Gump led the negotiations that this month landed WaMu a $6 billion settlement from JP Morgan Chase and the FDIC.
WaMu said in a written statement that Perkins Coie is working with court approval "to protect and maximize the value of Washington Mutual Inc.'s assets, including its valuable intellectual property, to benefit the company's bankruptcy estate and its creditors." It declined to discuss any specifics.
Perkins Coie also wouldn't comment on its work.
The question that may not be answered until WaMu's remaining assets are sold to satisfy creditor claims of $7 billion or more:
Is the WaMu name and logo, with or without Canadian and Mexican trademarks, worth more or less than the clutch of Internet domains that WaMu owns for another well-known name — kerrykillinger.com, -.net and -.org?
