In October 2021, Facebook announced it was changing its name to Meta. In July 2023, Twitter announced it was changing its name to X. Between them, these two companies employ tens of thousands of people, retain some of the most sophisticated legal departments on the planet, and had, by any reasonable estimate, more money to spend on trademark clearance than any client your agency will ever sign.
Both of them still got sued over the name.
That's the thesis of this post, and it should terrify every naming director reading it: if Meta and Twitter — with unlimited budget, in-house IP counsel, and outside firms on retainer — can ship a rebrand that collides with existing trademark rights, then the $40,000 naming engagement your agency just wrapped for a Series A startup did not get more scrutiny than theirs did. It got less.
The U.S. advertising agency industry does roughly $88.7 billion in revenue a year. A meaningful share of that is naming and identity work. Almost none of it comes with a clearance process rigorous enough to have caught what happened to Meta and Twitter. Here's what happened to them — and why it's coming for your clients too.
This isn't a new problem. In 1996, Circuit City filed a federal lawsuit to protect a name it had already spent millions building a national advertising campaign around: CarMax. A small used-car dealer in Ohio had been using the name first, and Circuit City had to go to court to establish priority. Around the same period, OfficeMax came after Circuit City over the "MAX" suffix itself, arguing confusion across the broader family of "Max" retail names. Circuit City eventually won the CarMax dispute — the Sixth Circuit found Circuit City had established priority through pre-launch advertising — but not before years of litigation over a name that should have been checked before the campaign was built. Circuit City Stores, Inc. v. Carmax, Inc., 165 F.3d 1047 (6th Cir. 1999).
The mistake, then and now, is the same: treating "nobody's using this exact name" as the finish line instead of the starting line. "Available" means nobody has sued anyone yet. It says nothing about whether the name sits in open water in the category the client is about to compete in. That's a different question, and it requires a different search — a clearance search against the federal register, mapped to the client's actual class of goods and services, not a Google search against the client's actual competitors.
Thirty years after CarMax, the same mistake took down two of the most valuable rebrands in corporate history.
When Facebook renamed itself Meta Platforms in October 2021, the backlash wasn't just about the metaverse bet. Within months, the company was fielding trademark claims from multiple directions.
METAx LLC, an experiential-technology company that had been building augmented and virtual reality activations for clients like Red Bull and Twitter since 2010, sued Meta Platforms for trademark infringement in the Southern District of New York in July 2022. As of the most recent public docket activity in early 2025, the case was still in active discovery — more than three years after the rebrand, and counting.
Separately, a twelve-year-old immersive-experience startup that had been operating under the name META since before Facebook existed filed its own infringement suit, and the owner of a company called Meta PC came forward with a trademark filing for "Meta" dated two months before Facebook's announcement — meaning that under first-to-file principles, Meta PC's owner had a stronger paper claim to the name than the company that renamed itself around it.
None of these are frivolous nuisance claims from patent trolls. They're the predictable result of a name search that checked whether "Meta" was famous enough to be safe, and never checked who already owned it in the classes that mattered. A company with Meta Platforms' resources did not think it needed to run the same clearance check a $15,000 naming engagement should run as a matter of course. That's not a knock on Meta's legal team — it's evidence of how easy this is to get wrong even when you're not trying to cut corners.
Twitter's rebrand to X, announced by Elon Musk and then-CEO Linda Yaccarino on July 23, 2023, ran into the same wall immediately — except this time, trademark attorneys saw it coming in real time.
Trademark attorney Josh Gerben told reporters he'd counted nearly 900 active U.S. trademark registrations already covering the letter "X" across a wide range of industries — including marks held by Meta itself, which had acquired a white-and-blue "X" registration for social networking, gaming, and app development from Microsoft in 2020, and by Microsoft directly, which holds X-related marks tied to Xbox. Gerben's assessment at the time: "100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody."
He was right, just not about who would sue first. In September 2025, X Corp settled a trademark dispute with X Social Media — an advertising agency that markets to attorneys — over rights to the "X" name in the marketing space, with the smaller firm agreeing to change its own name. Read that again: Twitter's rebrand created enough of a collision that it forced a marketing agency to rebrand because of a name conflict Twitter's own rebrand caused. The landmine this post keeps warning about detonated on an actual marketing agency.
And the fallout isn't over. In December 2025, X Corp filed suit in Delaware federal court against a Virginia startup called Operation Bluebird, which had petitioned the USPTO to cancel X's federal "Twitter" trademark registrations — arguing that X Corp had effectively abandoned the Twitter mark by rebranding away from it. X Corp's own filing states flatly: "a rebrand is not an abandonment of trademark rights." Whether that argument holds is still being litigated as of this writing, but the fact that it's a live legal question at all should tell you something: a mark you stop actively using can be treated in law as a mark you've given up. Protection is not a plaque you hang once. It's a status you have to keep maintaining — through use, through renewal, through consistent enforcement — or a court can decide you walked away from it.
Meta and Twitter have the balance sheets to survive years of litigation as a cost of doing business. Most of your clients don't, and the same pattern shows up constantly at every size below them.
Louis Vuitton had to sue a South Korean fried chicken chain that branded itself "Louis Vuiton Dak" and copied its packaging design — the chicken chain lost and was fined after failing to fully rebrand as ordered. Segway sued a hoverboard company called Swagway over the naming similarity; Swagway settled by renaming itself Swagtron. Starbucks went after a small competitor's "Freddoccino" drink name for trading too closely on its own "Frappuccino." Adidas and Forever 21 fought over the three-stripe design for years before settling out of court. None of these companies are household names on the scale of Meta or Twitter. Every one of them still had to spend money, time, and reputation cleaning up a naming or branding decision that a clearance search would have flagged before launch.
That's the part agencies underprice. The clients most exposed to this risk aren't the Fortune 500 companies with legal departments — they're the founders and small businesses who hired your agency precisely because they don't have one, and are trusting you to know what they don't.
Here's the fifteen-minute version of what should happen before a name ever reaches a client's approval deck.
First: stop asking whether the name is available and start asking whether it's ownable. Run a clearance search against the federal trademark register, specifically in the class of goods and services the client actually sells in — not just a scan for identical hits.
Second: understand that a brand isn't one asset, it's four layers, and clearing one doesn't clear the rest. The wordmark is the name itself — what shows up on the invoice and the incorporation documents. The logo mark is the visual identity — most founders only ask how to trademark a logo after it's already on merchandise, which is backwards. (If you're deciding between protecting the name, the logo, or both — it's both, for different reasons.) The tagline is the phrase the founder repeats on every stage. And the class — the specific category of goods or services the mark is registered to cover under 37 C.F.R. § 6.1 and TMEP § 1401.02 — is the layer that decides whether the other three actually hold up once the client scales into a market where getting sued is worth someone's time.
Third: treat protection as a maintenance schedule, not a one-time event — the way Meta is still discovering three years into active litigation, and the way X Corp is now litigating over whether it abandoned its own trademark by rebranding away from it. The brand isn't finished the day the deck gets delivered. It's finished the day the right marks are registered, in the right classes, renewed on schedule, and actively used — because a mark you stop using is a mark you can lose, the same way an LLC filing alone was never enough to protect the brand in the first place.
None of this is the agency's job to execute. It is the agency's job to know it needs to happen, and to get the client to someone who can run it before the name is locked into packaging, a domain, and a Series A pitch deck — not after the rebrand becomes the story.
Meta and Twitter didn't get this wrong because trademark clearance is hard. They got it wrong because it's boring, it's not billable in the way the creative work is, and it's easy to assume someone else already checked. Nobody had. If that's true at companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars, it is certainly true at the naming sprint your team ran last Tuesday.
The best agencies don't just build brands. They build brands their clients get to keep — which, as two of the biggest tech companies on earth are currently finding out in federal court, is a lot harder to do retroactively than it is to do right the first time.
If you're an agency building brands for founders — or a founder working with one — and you want a clearance check on classification before the name locks in, email me: pablo@segarraip.com
Not sure whether this even needs an attorney yet? Here's the honest answer.
Include:
Email "GUIDE" and I'll send the Ultimate Trademark Guide.
Pablo Segarra is a trademark attorney licensed in New York and the founder of Segarra IP, offering brand protection services for founders and the agencies that build for them.