RatnerPrestia Litigation Team Secures Exclusive Trademark Ownership and Business Ownership for Client

Please click here to view the article.

Washington, D.C. | April 2016 – As reported in yesterday’s Washington Post, RatnerPrestia’s litigation team of Tom Southard, Brian Seal, Victor Balancia, and Sunjeev Sikand, recently resolved a long-running legal dispute over the ownership rights to the Washington, D.C.-based Z-Burger restaurant chain and related intellectual property. The parties to the dispute, Payam “Peter” Tabibian and Mohammad and Ebrahim Esfahani have agreed to divide the six locations at issue into two separate groups, with RatnerPrestia client Tabibian taking exclusive control of the Z-Burger brand and intellectual property. Mr. Tabibian also takes sole ownership of Z-Burger’s flagship location in the Tenleytown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. as well as a second location in the nearby Columbia Heights area. Those two stores are added to Mr. Tabibian’s two other existing locations in the Dupont Circle area and in Towson, Maryland, as well as a DC-based food truck. The Esfahani brothers will phase out their use of the Z-Burger brand in the remaining locations over the next 60 days and then re-brand their restaurants, which are located in Arlington, Virginia, Glover Park and 4th Street Southwest DC, and White Marsh, Maryland. The resolution follows an 18-month long litigation which included a week-long evidentiary hearing presided over by Judge Peter J. Messitte in the U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland last August.