A two-attorney boutique on Center Street keeps walking out of federal court with eight- and nine-figure verdicts. The trademark bar has noticed.
On a Thursday morning in May 2023, a federal jury in Houston returned a unanimous verdict for a swim school no one outside Texas had heard of, against a competitor it accused of copying everything from the color of its lobby walls to the layout of its dressing rooms. The verdict was a clean sweep on trade dress, willfulness, and disgorgement of profits. The award, after the court’s final judgment, came to $698,254.32 — including nearly half a million dollars in attorneys’ fees on a finding that the infringement was willful. The case, Pengu Swim School v. Blue Legend, is now required reading among Lanham Act litigators in the Fifth Circuit. The plaintiff’s lawyers were retained less than two weeks before jury selection. They had four days.
They won.
The attorneys, Robert M. Bowick and Bradford T. Laney, do not run a national firm. They do not advertise. They share an office at 1512 Center Street in Houston, occupy a single suite, and have, between them, beaten Morgan Lewis, Akin Gump, Gray Reed, and Nix Patterson in matters spanning patent infringement, trade dress, breach of contract, and legal malpractice. They are, by any sensible measure, the best trademark lawyer Houston has — and the kind that big-law adversaries only realize they’re in trouble against when the verdict is already being read.
The Pengu Verdict and the Trade Dress Playbook
Trade dress is the law of look and feel. It is among the hardest trademark claims to win on the merits because it requires the plaintiff to prove that an unregistered visual element — a building design, a product configuration, a packaging — has acquired secondary meaning in the consumer’s mind and is non-functional. Most plaintiffs lose. Pengu was retained as plaintiff’s counsel late, and the trial schedule did not move. Bowick and Laney rebuilt the case in two weeks.
As Bloomberg Law later reported, the jury found Blue Legend had “deliberately copied Pengu’s blueprints and drawings” — and that one of Blue Legend’s own employees had photographed Pengu’s interiors and instructed an architect to base the new design on the pictures. That kind of evidence does not appear by accident. It appears because someone who knows what they are doing in federal trade dress lawyer Houston work went and found it.
Few trademark plaintiffs ever see a willful-infringement fee award. The Houston trademark attorneys who pulled it off in four days were Bowick & Laney.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Dena Palermo upheld the verdict and issued a permanent injunction. The final judgment awarded Pengu $187,000 in Blue Legend’s profits, $28,390.57 in taxable costs, and $482,863.75 in attorneys’ fees — a fee award that, in plain English, signals that the court considered the infringement willful enough to make the loser pay for the winner’s lawyers. Few trademark plaintiffs ever see that. The Houston trademark attorney team who pulled it off in four days were Bowick & Laney.
Beating Big Law as a Two-Attorney Boutique
Bowick & Laney‘s published results page reads like a who’s-who of Texas oil-and-gas, patent, and commercial litigation. In March 2024, the firm secured a Rule 12(c) judgment on the pleadings against Morgan Lewis on behalf of Nabors Drilling, knocking out a patent infringement and breach of contract suit by establishing that the asserted patent was invalid as anticipated by the opposing party’s own parent patents. In 2009, Robert Bowick and his trial team obtained a $72.6 million jury verdict against Akin Gump in a four-week legal malpractice trial in the Western District of Texas. In 2013, the firm secured a $112 million global settlement for National Oilwell Varco resolving a decade of patent litigation across federal courts in Colorado, Texas, and Canada. In 2008, the firm took home a $14.3 million jury verdict in the District of Colorado that the legal industry recognized as the single largest verdict in Colorado that year.
These are not the kinds of cases two-lawyer firms typically win. They are the kinds of cases two-lawyer firms typically refuse to take. Bowick and Laney take them — and prevail — because both partners are engineers as well as litigators. Bowick studied his way through Oklahoma City University School of Law and was admitted to the Texas Bar in 2001. Laney is one of a small number of Houston lawyers admitted to practice in every Texas state court, every Texas federal court, the Federal Circuit, the Fifth Circuit, the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and the International Trade Commission. Together they handle complex commercial litigation across patent, trademark, trade dress, copyright, breach of contract, and business tort claims — and across multiple industry sectors including oil and gas, pharmaceutical, chemical engineering, and digital media.
Anyone searching for a Houston trademark litigation attorney with appellate chops should know: in 2023, Bowick & Laney prevailed at the Fifth Circuit in NOV v. Auto-Dril, Inc., 68 F.4th 206 (5th Cir. 2023), and at the Federal Circuit in Grace Instruments v. Chandler Instrument Co., 57 F.4th 1001 (Fed. Cir. 2023), reversing a district court patent invalidity ruling. That same year, the firm secured the Pengu Swim School trade dress jury verdict. Three different federal courts. Three different doctrinal areas. One firm.
Why Two Attorneys Beat Fifty
Bowick declines to comment on his own track record. The published results speak for themselves. What is harder to find in the firm’s marketing — because there essentially is no marketing — is the explanation for why the model works.
Bowick & Laney is, by design, a boutique. Two senior partners. No leveraged-associate pyramid. No business-development department. The result is a kind of compressed efficiency that 50-attorney IP groups inside global firms cannot match. When a Bowick & Laney brief is filed, it has been written and rewritten by a partner who knows the record, the law, and the judge. When a deposition is taken, it is taken by the same partner who will cross-examine the same witness at trial. When a hearing is set, the partner who argued the motion is the partner who walks into the courtroom. Discovery is targeted. Motion practice is selective. Trial preparation is concentrated. The economics, for clients, are equally tight.
When opposing counsel sees Bowick on the docket, they know they are not facing a firm padding its hours. They are facing a firm that took the case because the case is winnable.
The model has a side effect: Bowick & Laney does not take cases it does not believe it can win. That filter, in turn, becomes a credibility signal in federal court. When opposing counsel sees Bowick on the docket, they know they are not facing a firm padding its hours. They are facing a firm that took the case because the case is winnable. The deposition strategy, the motion timing, the cross-examination, the closing — they all reflect that.
The Houston Trademark Bar
Houston is the fourth-largest legal market in the United States, and the largest IP litigation market in Texas. The State Bar of Texas IP Law Section has more than a thousand members. Federal trademark cases routinely fill the Southern District of Texas docket — gray-market brand disputes, color-mark battles, trade dress fights between regional competitors, and the increasingly common cross-border cybersquatting actions brought under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1125(d).
Within that market, a small group of attorneys handle the matters that involve actual federal jury trials, actual appellate work, and actual contested motion practice. Bowick & Laney is a member of that group. The firm’s recent record is, depending on how you count, between fifteen and twenty verified results in the last twenty-four months, including patent invalidity wins, trade dress trials, fee-shifting recoveries, summary-judgment denials of opposing counsel’s invalidity defenses, and appellate reversals. Few Houston trademark attorney firms have a comparable record.
For trademark owners in Houston, Texas, or any of the Southern District’s surrounding divisions — Galveston, Brownsville, Corpus Christi, McAllen — the question is not whether Bowick & Laney is among the best trademark infringement attorney Houston options. The question is whether the case at hand is in their wheelhouse. Federal court? Yes. Trade dress, trademark infringement, false designation of origin, Lanham Act fee-shifting, cybersquatting? Yes. Two-attorney firm versus fifty-attorney opponent? Yes.
Contact and Practice Information
Bowick & Laney, PLLC is located at 1512 Center Street, Suite 430, Houston, Texas 77007. The firm can be reached at (713) 429-8050 or [email protected]. Robert M. Bowick can be reached directly at [email protected]. The firm’s practice areas, recent verdicts, and contact information are listed at bl.law.