After being charged with trademark infringement by a tax firm, Better Call Saul may require the assistance of a genuine Saul Goodman
A real-world tax corporation is suing Better Call Saul for stealing their trademarks and branding. In season six of Better Call Saul, Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler launched a complex (and eventually fatal) conspiracy to bring down Howard Hamlin, which increased their scamming activities. They reluctantly recruited the Kettlemans, one of Jimmy’s previous targets, to help them with that scheme.
Fans of Better Call Saul will recall that Jimmy and Kim originally met Betsy and Craig Kettleman in season 1 of the show during a subplot involving the theft of money by the county treasurer Craig and his attempts to get away with his misdeeds. Then, in Season 6 Episode 2 “Carrot and Stick,” Betsy and Craig were running a sketchy tax business named “Sweet Liberty Tax Services” and promoting their fly-by-night enterprise with a recognizable-looking enormous inflatable Statue of Liberty. The Kettlemans first resisted participating in Jimmy and Kim’s Howard-related scams, but were ultimately coerced into acting as pawns when Kim threatened to report them to the IRS for defrauding senior citizens.
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After being sued by a genuine tax firm for the fictitious Sweet Liberty Tax Services, it now appears that AMC and Better Call Saul will need to hire their own legal counsel. According to The Wrap, Liberty Tax Services filed a lawsuit stating that the program purposefully misappropriated and plagiarized its brand and that its dubious tax service plot line amounted to “dilution, slander, disparagement, and injurious lies.” Part of the complaint reads:
Out of all the possible names for the tax business depicted in Episode 2, the defendants chose not to be original at all. Instead, they appropriated the well-known Liberty Tax trademarks, which have been in use for more than 25 years, and imitated an actual Liberty Tax location by simply adding the word “Sweet” before the trademark.
The inflatable Statue of Liberty that would ultimately be perched over Saul Goodman’s own strip mall law office was introduced in Better Call Saul by using the name of the company—Sweet Liberty Tax Services—clearly in part as a justification. Of course, it’s also completely plausible the writers wanted to poke fun at certain genuine tax services by portraying Sweet Liberty as a dubious enterprise. And because of that, the plot may be justified as parody.
We’ll have to wait and see how this lawsuit against Better Call Saul turns out. But if Jimmy McGill were defending the program in court, there’s little question that he’d employ some unconventional strategies in an effort to exonerate his clients. Indeed, one of the most entertaining aspects of Better Call Saul is how the drama incorporates actual legal issues by delving far into the legal literature in order to unearth fascinating elements that enhance the plot. However, considering the current legal repercussions of their work, it is debatable whether the writers of Better Call Saul should have dug further into their own imaginations when identifying the dubious corporation owned by the Kettlemans.
