Is it legal to bid on another law firm's name?

The rules on search-ad conquesting — what trademark law allows, where state bar ethics rules draw a harder line, and the one defense every firm can deploy in every state.

The short answer

Generally, yes. Buying a competitor's name as a search keyword is not, by itself, trademark infringement. Federal courts — including the Second Circuit in 1-800 Contacts v. Warby Parker and the Ninth Circuit in Lerner & Rowe v. Brown Engstrand — have held that keyword purchase alone does not create a likelihood of consumer confusion, because the person searching never sees which keywords an advertiser bought. They see only the ad. Courts have compared the practice to putting a billboard near a rival's office.

Where the line actually is

The visible ad is what matters. Putting the competitor's name in the ad's headline, description, or display URL — or implying any affiliation with the firm being searched for — can support infringement, unfair competition, and false advertising claims. Google's own trademark policy follows the same boundary: it permits bidding on competitors' terms but will restrict a trademark used in ad text after a complaint from the mark owner. In our monitoring data, ads that reproduce the searched firm's name in the visible copy are flagged separately for exactly this reason: those are the placements a firm can act on immediately.

The ethics layer most coverage misses

Trademark law is only half the analysis for lawyers, because attorney advertising is regulated by state bars. The state opinions do not agree. Texas (Opinion 661), New Jersey (Opinion 735, with the state Supreme Court expecting clear identification and in some circumstances a landing-page disclaimer), Florida, California, New York, and South Carolina generally permit competitive keyword bidding when the ad is truthful and plainly identifies the advertising firm. North Carolina goes the other way: its 2010 Formal Ethics Opinion 14, reaffirmed in 2023 Formal Ethics Opinion 4, treats intentionally bidding on another lawyer's unique trade name as conduct involving dishonesty under Rule 8.4(c), and a handful of older opinions elsewhere have leaned the same direction. A firm advertising across state lines answers to every bar whose rules reach it — conduct that is ordinary competition in Florida can be a disciplinary matter in North Carolina.

What we are actually measuring

This index checks whether one firm’s paid keyword portfolio contains another firm’s brand terms — a record of what an advertiser bought, not a snapshot of a single search result page. That distinction matters: ad auctions rotate, so one SERP check is one moment, while a keyword portfolio is a standing instruction.

Coverage so far: 21,885 of 21,885 firm pairs checked (100%). Within that slice, 88 firms have at least one other advertiser buying their name, across 32 advertisers and 4,555,040 monthly searches. The sweep is incomplete, so treat every figure as a floor — unchecked pairs can add advertisers, never remove them. No rate or share of firms is published until the pass finishes.

A rival’s name is the cheapest inventory on the board

The observed cost of intercepting a branded search, against the unbranded terms every firm competes for. Interception is not priced like aggression — it is priced like an arbitrage, and it is cheap precisely because the firm being intercepted is usually not bidding on its own name.

For comparison, top-of-page bids on unbranded terms such as “car accident lawyer” run into the hundreds of dollars per click in major markets — see the Morgan & Morgan report and the Spanish-language study.

Source: paid-keyword records from search-intelligence panels, swept pair by pair across the index. Presence in an advertiser’s keyword portfolio is documented; nothing here asserts intent, and nothing here asserts that any advertiser has violated any rule of professional conduct. Bidding on a competitor’s name is lawful under federal trademark law and permitted by Google; state bar rules differ, as set out above.

What a raided firm can actually do

Because the practice is mostly lawful, the remedies are practical, not judicial. There are four, and only one of them works everywhere:

• Defend the name. Run ads on your own branded terms. This is permitted in every state, and it is the cheapest advertising a firm will ever buy — search engines strongly favor the brand owner on its own name, so defensive clicks typically cost a fraction of what the intercepting advertiser pays. Defense is the one universal remedy.
• File the trademark complaint. If your name appears in a competitor's visible ad copy, Google's complaint process can get the ad restricted. This is the fastest win available, but it requires knowing the ad exists.
• Use the ethics rules where they apply. In jurisdictions that restrict the practice, the state bar is a live avenue — one that exists nowhere else in American advertising.
• Watch continuously. Interception is invisible by design: the searcher who was taken never tells you, and the ad may only run in one metro, on one device, in certain hours. Firms usually discover conquesting in a soft intake quarter, months after it began. Monitoring turns it into a same-week event.

Notice what the first and fourth remedies have in common: neither requires a lawsuit, a complaint, or a favorable state. They only require knowing, at all times, who is advertising on searches for your name — which is precisely what this index now watches for every measured firm.

See who is bidding on your name — $499/mo →