Last Chance Ranch v. McCutcheon — Court Awards $975,000 for Willful Trademark Counterfeiting and Cyberpiracy

Background

Last Chance Ranch and the defendants operate in the animal-rescue field. After a jury found Loren J. McCutcheon and Noah’s Ark Educational Zoo liable for willfully infringing the plaintiff’s word and illustration marks and for unfair competition, and found McCutcheon liable for cyberpiracy, Last Chance Ranch elected statutory damages. The court had already entered a $975,000 judgment; this memorandum explains how it calculated that award.

The Court’s Holding

Judge Catherine Henry awarded $900,000 for trademark counterfeiting. The evidence supported two counterfeit marks used across three distinct services—fundraising, animal boarding, and adoption—creating six compensable instances. The court set damages at $150,000 per instance based on the marks’ more than 25 years of use, their value and goodwill in the animal-rescue community, the defendants’ willfulness, nearly a decade of infringement, and discovery shortcomings that made actual losses difficult to calculate.

The court refused to multiply the six instances again by the number of defendants. The complaint and trial evidence treated the defendants’ infringement as joint conduct, and separate awards for the same uses would have produced a windfall. It separately awarded $75,000 for McCutcheon’s cyberpiracy because she knowingly incorporated the plaintiff’s word mark into a domain name.

The court also found the years of willful infringement made this an exceptional case warranting attorneys’ fees, but reserved the amount until counsel submits records supporting the reasonableness of the requested fees. It declined prejudgment interest.

Key Takeaways

• Lanham Act statutory damages can be calculated per counterfeit mark and per distinct type of goods or services.
• Courts need not multiply the award by each jointly acting defendant when that would compensate twice for the same infringement.
• Long-running willful conduct, valuable goodwill, weak discovery cooperation, and deterrence can justify a substantial award even when actual profits and losses are hard to prove.
• Willfulness may support exceptional-case fees, but the prevailing party must still prove the requested fee amount is reasonable.

Why It Matters

The opinion gives a practical roadmap for statutory-damages calculations when counterfeiting affects several service categories. It also draws an important limit: “per mark per type of service” does not automatically become “per mark per service per defendant” when defendants acted together. Trademark owners seeking statutory damages should build a record separating genuine product or service categories, while defendants should identify overlap that would turn multiplication into double recovery.