TEGOS advised a Lithuanian craft brewery on a strategically complex trademark portfolio acquisition that required coordinating non-use cancellation proceedings, multi-party settlement negotiations, trademark ownership transfers, and parallel criminal proceedings simultaneously across two separate counterparties and multiple registered marks.
The matter arose from the client’s need to secure clean and exclusive ownership of its brewery brand family — covering beer, alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages — where the relevant marks were held by two separate third parties. Both parties held marks that the client was already commercially using but did not legally own, creating significant and urgent brand exposure — including potential criminal liability under the Lithuanian Criminal Code, which criminalizes the unauthorized use of another’s trademark where substantial harm is caused.
TEGOS devised and executed a multi-track strategy. In the first track, the firm filed non-use cancellation proceedings before the Lithuanian State Patent Bureau against the marks held by both counterparties, on the grounds that the marks had not been genuinely used in trade for over five continuous years. In respect of the corporate counterparty, TEGOS established on the basis of public registry data that the original owner of the marks had entered bankruptcy and subsequently been liquidated, making any genuine commercial use of those marks objectively impossible for the requisite statutory period — a compelling evidentiary basis that significantly strengthened the client’s position.
In parallel, one of the counterparties escalated the dispute by filing a criminal complaint against the client with the Lithuanian police, invoking the Criminal Code a provision carrying penalties ranging from community service and fines through to deprivation of liberty of up to two years, and extending liability to legal persons. This elevated the stakes of the matter considerably, as the client faced not only civil brand exposure but active criminal prosecution risk.
TEGOS coordinated the firm’s response across both tracks simultaneously. On the civil side, the firm negotiated separately with each counterparty, converting the adversarial cancellation proceedings into consensual trademark transfers. In both cases, the transactions were carefully structured to ensure that the transfer agreements not only effected a clean change of ownership but also addressed the client’s retrospective exposure — documenting the basis on which the client had been using the marks prior to transfer so as to eliminate any residual infringement risk. Comprehensive transfer documentation was prepared and submitted to the Patent Bureau in each instance. On the criminal side, TEGOS’s strategic resolution of the civil dispute and in particular the documented legitimization of the client’s prior use through the settlement framework provided the factual and legal foundation to bring the criminal proceedings to a close, protecting the client from prosecution entirely.
Once the transfers were registered, TEGOS filed withdrawal requests in all pending cancellation proceedings and simultaneously pursued available cost-recovery mechanisms, maximizing the financial efficiency of the overall transaction for the client.
The TEGOS team included Indrė Barauskienė and Inesa Grybova.
