Trademark Licensing in the Shadow of Bankruptcy

When a business licenses a trademark, transactional lawyers regularly advise that if the trademark licensor files for bankruptcy, the licensee could be left without a right to use the mark and with only a bankruptcy claim for money damages against the licensor. Indeed, the ability of a trademark licensor to reject a trademark license and to limit a licensee's remedies to a dischargeable claim for money damages has been a significant risk for licensees for twenty-five years based on the Fourth Circuit case, Lubrizol Enterprises, Inc. v. Richmond Metal Finishers, Inc. This result is grounded in the Bankruptcy Code prohibition on remedies of specific performance for non-debtor parties to rejected contracts and is in accord with Bankruptcy Code policy of affording debtors an opportunity to reorganize free of burdensome contracts. In the summer of 2012, however, the Seventh Circuit, in its decision Sunbeam Products, Inc. v. Chicago American Manufacturing, LLC, held that a non-debtor trademark licensee retains rights to use licensed trademarks following rejection of the contract by the debtor-licensor. The decision, derived from a pre-Bankruptcy Code paradigm for understanding the rights of non-debtors under rejected executory contracts that convey interests in property, creates a circuit split over the implications of trademark license rejection. This article asserts that the Sunbeam Products case misconstrues the rights of a trademark licensee as a vested property right and is therefore incorrect under both the holding of the Lubrizol case and the pre-Bankruptcy Code paradigm on which the Sunbeam Products case relies.