Most brand owners assume that winning a trademark infringement suit means the infringer eventually writes a cheque. Sue, win, collect. On 26 February 2025, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the second half of that sequence is a lot narrower than most plaintiffs think.

In Dewberry Group, Inc. v. Dewberry Engineers Inc., 604 U.S. ___ (2025), Justice Kagan, writing for a unanimous Court, held that under the Lanham Act’s disgorgement provision (§1117(a)), a court can only award the profits of the party actually named as the defendant. Not its parent company. Not its sister companies. Not any other legally separate affiliate that happens to be part of the same operation, however tightly linked they are in practice. “Defendant” means what it has always meant in the ordinary legal sense: the party against whom relief is sought in that specific case.

That distinction sounds technical. It cost Dewberry Engineers most of a $43 million judgment.

What actually happened in Dewberry

Dewberry Engineers, a Virginia-based real estate firm, and Dewberry Group, a Georgia-based real estate firm, have disputed the use of the “Dewberry” name since 2006. The two companies settled that first dispute in 2007. Tensions resurfaced after Dewberry Group rebranded in 2017 and introduced sub-brands including Dewberry Living and Studio Dewberry, prompting Dewberry Engineers to sue again in 2020.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Dewberry Engineers and affirmed a $43 million disgorgement award against Dewberry Group. The problem: Dewberry Group itself reported little to no profit on its own books. The bulk of the $43 million came from profits earned by Dewberry Group’s affiliated companies, entities that were never named as defendants in the suit. The lower courts had effectively treated the whole corporate family as one economic unit for the purposes of calculating damages.

The Supreme Court said that is not how §1117(a) works. A plaintiff can only collect the profits of the entity it actually sued. If a plaintiff wants to reach an affiliate’s profits, it needs to name that affiliate as a defendant, or separately establish grounds like piercing the corporate veil. Simply pointing at a related company’s bank account after winning is not enough. The Court vacated the Fourth Circuit’s judgment and remanded the case, explicitly declining to weigh in on several related questions: whether the “just sum” language elsewhere in §1117(a) could support a different profits calculation, whether courts can look behind a defendant’s own accounting or tax records to find its true financial gain, and whether veil-piercing remains available on these facts. All three stay open for the lower courts to work through.

Justice Sotomayor wrote a separate concurrence sketching two ways the district court could still arrive at a similar number on remand using better evidence: examining whether Dewberry Group paid its affiliates below-market rates for shared resources (effectively suppressing its own reported profit), or tracing cash infusions an individual associated with the company made into Dewberry Group, potentially sourced from affiliate profits. In other words, the ruling closes off a shortcut, not the underlying result. It just requires the plaintiff to build the case for it properly.

To be precise about what this case is and is not: it is a trademark dispute over the use of a company name between two real estate businesses. It is not a counterfeit goods case, and Dewberry Group was not accused of selling fake products. But the structural gap the ruling addresses, profits sitting just out of reach in a separately incorporated entity, is a much more common problem in the world Truviss’s customers operate in.

Why this matters even if you never sue a real estate company

Counterfeit and marketplace-abuse operations are built around exactly the kind of corporate fragmentation Dewberry turned on, usually on purpose. A single infringing operation frequently runs through a web of shell storefronts, shifting seller accounts, and thinly capitalised fronts, each one showing minimal profit on paper even while the operation as a whole moves real money. That structure was not designed with this Supreme Court ruling in mind, but it benefits from the same principle: a court will only make you pay what the entity you actually sued can be shown to have earned.

Put plainly, if the Supreme Court will not let a plaintiff reach into an affiliate’s accounts without naming that affiliate directly, or without doing the harder work of proving veil-piercing or suppressed pricing the way Sotomayor’s concurrence describes, a brand suing a single storefront, reseller account, or shell company sits in the identical position. Recovery is capped at what that one named party can be proven to have made, regardless of how much money the broader operation behind it actually generated. Tools designed to track repeat infringers and connect related listings, the kind of monitoring built into a marketplace scanner, exist precisely to surface which entities are actually operating before a case gets filed, not after a judgment turns out to be uncollectable.

Truviss covers this same enforcement gap on the takedown side too. Getting content or a listing removed quickly, the mechanics behind a takedown request, stops the immediate bleeding, but it does not answer the separate question this ruling raises: who is actually behind the operation, and can a future damages claim, if it ever comes to that, name them correctly.

This is also a different problem from the one another recent ruling addressed. Truviss covered how two 2026 Seventh Circuit decisions made Schedule A litigation, the fast, multi-defendant tool brands use against overseas counterfeit sellers, harder to use by tightening jurisdiction and service-of-process requirements. That is a case about getting a court to hear the claim at all. Dewberry is a case about what a brand can actually collect once it wins. Different legal mechanism, same underlying theme: procedural and structural gaps keep narrowing what enforcement can deliver, which puts more weight on what a brand does before it ever files.

The real takeaway: litigation was never the plan

None of this makes trademark enforcement pointless. It is another data point in a pattern brand owners are increasingly running into: a favourable judgment is not automatically a financial outcome. Recovery now depends heavily on naming the right parties from the outset, and naming the right parties depends on knowing who is actually behind an infringement before you file, not discovering it during discovery or, worse, after judgment.

That is where proactive detection earns its keep. Continuous online brand protection monitoring across marketplaces, social platforms, and app stores is what surfaces the actual operating entity and seller network behind an infringement while there is still time to name it correctly and structure a case around it. A documented evidence trail, timestamps, verified listings, and account history, also determines whether a brand can even prove who the right defendant is once it does decide to litigate, exactly the kind of evidentiary work Sotomayor’s concurrence shows a court is willing to credit. Truviss’s case management and evidence storage exists for exactly that reason: building the record that makes a future legal claim collectable, not just winnable.

Litigation should be the backstop, not the strategy. The Dewberry ruling is a reminder that even when the backstop works exactly as intended, and this was a clean, unanimous Supreme Court win for the underlying legal principle, it still cannot recover money that was never in the named defendant’s hands to begin with. Detection and prevention are what determine whether a brand is chasing the right target in the first place.