Money Saving Expert good at litigation as well as saving money

Martyn Lewis, as many of you will be aware is the founder and brains behind MoneysSavingExpert.com which is an excellent site and Mr Lewis is clearly a very astute businessman as well as being a bundle of energy as his morning tv appearances show. Not only that, he is either astute when it comes to law or he has an excellent team of lawyers or probably both.

This was shown by the fact that recently he won a summary judgment case relating to trademark infringement whereby a sales company used the phrase moneysavingexpert in various marketing and communication attempts at getting the public to make claims for miss-sold Payment Protection Insurance.

This is interesting also as an example of summary judgment applications. Such applications are not without significant risk, the legal burden on the applicant is a high one, and such applications are generally a high risk, high reward strategy. In effect it is necessary to convince the court that there is sufficient paperwork evidence such that the Defendant has a very small chance of successfully defending at trial. Judges are quite reluctant to award summary judgment bearing in mind most cases do involve important issues to be tested by proper verbal evidence and cross examination.

Technical cases such as IP infringement claims are perhaps more appropriate for these types of summary judgment application, but before you consider making such an application, always get good legal advice and consider the potential downside. With these types of application, as with injunctions, if you fail, you may well face a hefty costs bill payable to your opponent and may well embolden the opponent to fight on.