Gap Lawyers Accused of Not Minding the Gap in Trademark Suit

One trick of the high-school set when writing what they believe to be a ridiculously long paper is to just change the margins. Push things in a little and it makes it that much easier to achieve the required number of pages. Some never leave this little trick behind. A judge in Manhattan, Paul A. Engelmayer, who is hearing a trademark suit involving Gap Inc.'s flagship Gap brand, requires that all documents put before him be double spaced. But lawyers represent the mega-retailer have been accused of adjusting the spacing in such a way that they achieved “four extra lines per page,” the Wall Street Journal reports. 

The lawyers in question work at Fross Zelnick Lehrman & Zissu PC and they are working on a case about “a trademark dispute involving T-shirts labeled with the phrase ‘Lower East Side’ and ‘LES NYC,’” the Journal notes. Their adversaries, the legal team at Patterson Belknap Webb Tyler LLP, took a recent brief sent by Gap lawyers and “used a computer program to determine that the line spacing on Fross Zelnick’s reply brief was ‘1.75’ instead of double spaced.” Because of this, the judge allowed Patterson Belknap to “file a 30-page, instead of 25-page, brief on Thursday” so that the two sides would be given equal space to express themselves. 

As for the suit itself, it was filed by New York-based designer Robert Lopez of LES Clothing Co, who has quite a track record taking on big brands.Continue reading...