The Law Firm Dr. Khalid Alnowaiser of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, just lost its bid to get the domain name lfkan.com in a UDRP
The Complainant is a law firm established in 1996, with offices in Riyadh and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The Complainant offers a range of legal services to local and international clients, in both Arabic and English.
Although the one member UDRP panel found that “The record suggests bad faith on the part of a disaffected former employee of the Complainant, who seems to have hijacked the Domain Name and thereby caused injury to the Complainant’s business. ”
“The Complainant may be able to pursue other legal remedies for this conduct, but the UDRP offers no remedy without establishing rights in a relevant mark, which the Complainant has failed to do.”
“The Complainant does not claim a registered trademark right.
According to the Complaint, the Complainant has been “known in the market” since 1996 by the initials “LFKAN”: “LF” for “Law Firm”, “K” for “Khalid”, and “N” for “Nowaiser”, eliding the prefix “AL” (the definite article “the” in Arabic) because it so commonly appears at the beginning of surnames in Saudi Arabia. (The Complaint does not explain why the letter “A” is used nonetheless in the abbreviation.)
The Complainant asserts, with support from DomainTools screen shots of historical WhoIs records, that the Complainant registered and used the Domain Name from November 2000 until July 2013 for its firm website and email addresses.
In July 2013, however, the registration of the Domain Name was updated, apparently by Mr. S. Faraz, who was the Complainant’s employee responsible for information technology and whose firm email address was formerly listed in the administrative and technical contact details for the Domain Name.
According to the Complaint, the firm had recently terminated Mr. Faraz for unrelated reasons.
Mr. Faraz refused to furnish the password used to administer the Domain Name registration, and he changed the name servers so that the firm’s website was no longer displayed and its email addresses were deactivated. At the time of this Decision, the Domain Name resolves to a version of the Complainant’s website that appears not to display information dated more recently than 2012.
The current registration details for the Domain Name show the registering organization as “andrewsmith”, which does not appear to be a registered legal entity in the United Kingdom or in Saudi Arabia.
The administrative and technical contact person is listed as “andrew smith”, with a Google Gmail address.…
