Roger A. Colaizzi

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Roger Colaizzi chairs Venable’s national Advertising Litigation group. Roger has significant trial experience litigating Lanham Act false advertising, state deceptive trade practices, unfair competition, advertising class actions, trial and continuity marketing, direct-to-consumer marketing, social networking, affiliate advertising, domain names, keyword advertising, and other e-commerce matters. He has extensive trial experience in litigating brand protection advertising issues, including anti-counterfeiting, trademark, trade dress, patent, and copyright. He has successfully brought and defended against dozens of emergency preliminary injunction motions and requests for temporary restraining orders— important remedies in competitive advertising and the protection of IP, product brands, and other proprietary assets.

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Join us as we spotlight select chapters of Venable’s popular Advertising Law Tool Kit, which helps marketing teams navigate their organization’s legal risk. Click here to download the entire Tool Kit, and tune in to the Ad Law Tool Kit Show podcast, to hear the authors of this chapter dive deeper into surviving an FTC investigation in this week’s episode.

If your advertising or marketing practices have triggered a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation and you have received a civil investigative demand (CID) (i.e., administrative subpoena) or access letter, what’s next? Every situation is unique, and every strategy, heavily fact dependent. Below are a few points to consider based on our considerable years of experience handling significant FTC matters and working with and against senior FTC officials.

Keep these points in mind when navigating an FTC investigation:

Continue Reading Surviving an FTC Investigation: An Excerpt from the Advertising Law Tool Kit

Join us as we spotlight select chapters of Venable’s popular Advertising Law Tool Kit, which helps marketing teams navigate their organization’s legal risk. Click here to download the entire Tool Kit, and tune in to the Ad Law Tool Kit Show podcast, to hear the authors of this chapter dive deeper into the issue of negative option and continuity marketing in this week’s episode.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), state attorneys general, and class action plaintiffs continue to scrutinize negative option and continuity offers. Negative option marketing can include pre-notification negative option plans, continuity programs, automatic renewals, and free-to-pay (or discounted price-to-pay) conversions.

The key to success in avoiding investigations and liability can be as simple as making clear and complete disclosures (prominent, clearly explained, and placed where they will be read and where consumers’ attention is focused); obtaining consumers’ express, informed affirmative consent to the negative option offer; providing a simple cancellation mechanism; sending post-order confirmations and renewal reminders; and ensuring that refunds and cancellations are processed in accordance with disclosed policies.Continue Reading Negative Option and Continuity Marketing: An Excerpt from the Advertising Law Tool Kit

This week we are planning to post a series of blogs looking at NAD procedural issues.  For advertisers, how NAD works can sometimes be as important as what NAD decides.  This first posting, however, pertains to the intersection between the NAD and the federal courts.  The evidentiary value of an opinion by an advertising self-regulatory body like the NAD is an issue that has received relatively little attention.  Although NAD is designed to adjudicate advertising disputes quickly, efficiently, and effectively, sadly it does not always have the final word.  Sometimes a disappointed party before the NAD chooses to move the dispute to federal court under the Lanham Act.  Other times, the advertiser may find itself the subject of a consumer class action lawsuit after receiving an unfavorable NAD recommendation.  In either circumstance, your client may wonder: What evidentiary impact will the NAD’s case report have if my advertising is challenged in federal court?  The answer is probably very little, although the impact may vary depending on the posture of the litigation and the reason for which the case report is offered as evidence.

For many lawyers, the hearsay rule remains seared into law school memory: Hearsay is an out-of-court statement that “a party offers in evidence to prove the truth of the matter asserted in the statement.”  Even if relevant, hearsay is inadmissible as evidence unless offered for a non-hearsay purpose or under one of the numerous hearsay exceptions provided for by the rules.  In federal court, an NAD decision might be used for three reasons – one is typically inadmissible hearsay; the second is usually admissible non-hearsay; and the third is not evidentiary at all.
Continue Reading NAD Case Reports in Federal Court: What Evidentiary Value Does a Self-Regulatory Decision Hold?

AppleThough the holiday gift-giving battle between Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle may have quieted recently, the ongoing legal war between the two technology giants continues. Last week, Amazon.com Inc. scored an opening round victory when a California federal judge granted its motion for partial summary judgment, dismissing Apple’s false advertising claim against the online retailer.…