J. Noah Hagey

J. Noah Hagey is a co-founder and managing partner at BraunHagey & Borden LLP, a complex litigation and corporate boutique. The firm has grown to 50 attorneys at two offices since its launch in 2009.

“It’s exciting,” Hagey said. “We’re running one of the few full-service boutique practices with offices on both coasts. I spend part of a week each month in New York, where we have 18 lawyers and we’re still hiring.”

Alongside the firm’s commercial practice, Hagey runs an impact litigation operation to promote systemic change for the underserved and unrepresented.

He scored a win in early April in a notorious Texas book-banning case when lawyers for his firm persuaded a federal judge to order local officials to return banned books to a county library system pending an October trial. Little v. Llano County et al., 1:22-cv-00424 (W.D. Tx., filed April 25, 2022).

The matter fits within his IP practice, Hagey said. “This is a question of the intellectual property of the public square.”

In his commercial work, in March, Hagey was lead trial counsel for a blockchain and cryptocurrency developer seeing to protect its trademark. The temporary restraining order he obtained was the first in the U.S. applying the Lanham Act to conduct involving open-source developer blockchain and crypto protocols.

The dispute at issue concerned his client’s TARI trademark and a competitor’s TARO brand. Tari Labs LLC v. Lighting Labs Inc., 3:22-cv-07789 (N.D. Cal., filed Dec. 8, 2022).

“Judge [William H.] Orrick enjoined further development of the competitor’s product,” Hagey said.

“There’s been a lot of libertarian interest behind decentralizing monetary systems, and there were suggestions that open-source digital blockchain technology would be somewhat less protectable. But this is a signal that the rules that apply in other parts of the economy also apply in the world of digital assets.”

Hagey is still in post-trial litigation over his big win for a craft brewery client in a trademark dispute with a large national brand. The jury’s $56 million damages award over MillerCoors LLC’s Keystone brand’s infringement of Stone Brewing Co.’s Stone mark was the fourth largest IP trademark jury verdict in history, Hagey said. It was a Daily Journal Top Verdict of 2022. Stone Brewing Co. v. MillerCoors LLC, 10-cv-00331 (S.D. Cal., filed Feb. 12, 2018).

The outcome clarified questions regarding the scope and effect of “reverse confusion” in trademark law. Hagey said the verdict has survived a first round of defense efforts to overturn it; he expects a similar result in a second round currently underway.

“Meanwhile, the judgment is accruing interest at a healthy federal pace,” he said.

—John Roemer