A Federal appeals court has upheld a lower court's summary judgment in favor of an Arizona personal-injury law firm that had been sued for federal and state trademark infringement and unjust enrichment by a competing firm.

Lerner & Rowe sued competitor Brown, Engstrand & Shely because for a period of years Brown's ads appeared in Lerner's Google search results, allegedly as a result of Brown using Lerner's trademarks as keywords in their Google Ads campaign, and that this deception resulted in the siphoning off of clients from Lerner.

Judge David Campbell found that although Brown's ads appeared in results of Google searches for Lerner 109,000 times between 2017 and 2021, Brown received only 200 phone calls from people who thought they had called Lerner. And that the lower court had been correct in handing down a summary judgment in favor of Brown because only a tiny fraction of people may have been confused by the Google Ads.

A Lerner & Rowe spokesperson said that their firm do not agree that hundreds of consumed consumers fails to constitute an "appreciable amount".

Comment: Remember that this case involved the use of competitors' trademarks as keywords in a Google Ads campaign - quite a different thing from placing trademarks in the ad copy, which is against Google's advertising policies and is clearly trademark infringement.