A client forwarded us an email on Monday afternoon. It was headed “Formal Notice Regarding Potential Business Name Rights”, it cited four provisions of the Trade Marks Act 1994, it was signed by a “Registered IP Solicitor”, and it gave her 72 hours to respond about a trademark application somebody else was supposedly about to file on her own brand name.
She asked us a simple question. Is this real?
That turned out to be a harder question than usual, and the answer is worth writing down, because this one is not like the others in this directory. You can read the full email, redacted, at the foot of this page.
Is RSK Legal a real law firm?
Yes. We should say that first and say it plainly.
RSK Legal Ltd is regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. It appears on the SRA register as a recognised body, authorised for all legal services, SRA number 8007371, recognised on 29 July 2026, with a head office at Leicester Business Centre, 111 Ross Walk, Leicester. Its one SRA-regulated person is its director, Ramandeep Singh Kular, a solicitor admitted in January 2020 with a current practising certificate. Neither the firm nor the solicitor has a published regulatory decision against them.
At Companies House, RSK LEGAL LTD is company 14099188, incorporated on 10 May 2022, active, filing on time, with Mr Kular as its sole director.
All of that checks out, and you can check it yourself on the SRA register in about a minute.
Which is exactly what makes the rest of this worth reading. Because there are a number of things about the email our client received, and about the website it points to, that do not sit alongside any of the above.
What did the notice actually say?
It opened by telling her that a trademark application for her own brand name was “presently undergoing our pre-filing due diligence and verification procedures”, cited sections 5, 5(4)(a) and 38 of the Trade Marks Act 1994 together with the Trade Marks Rules 2008, and asked her to confirm within 72 hours whether she used the name or claimed any interest in it.
Nothing in that email says anyone wants to sell anything. Our client could not work out what she was being asked for, so she replied and asked. The answer arrived the same day, and this time the offer was explicit: another applicant wanted her name, and “we can assist you with the process of registering the name as a UK trade mark with the UKIPO before the other applicant proceeds further.”
The first email is signed Chantal Marika Reid. The second is signed Chantal Marisa Reid. Both are reproduced in full at the foot of this page.
When was the website registered?
This is the check that reframes everything else, and it takes about thirty seconds.
The domain rsklegal.co.uk was registered on 8 September 2026. The letter to our client was sent on 21 September 2026. The website was thirteen days old.
The public domain records show three:
- rsklegal.com — registered 20 August 2026, one-year term, registrar OpusDNS GmbH in Germany
- rsklegal.co.uk — registered 8 September 2026, one-year term, registrar Dynadot LLC in California, hosted on Namecheap shared hosting
- rsklegal.uk — registered 11 September 2026, one-year term, registrar Fasthosts in the UK
Three domains, three different registrars in three different countries, all taken within three weeks of each other, all on the minimum one-year term. When we checked the Nominet record, rsklegal.co.uk was still inside its initial registration period. The registrant’s name and address are withheld, which on its own tells us nothing, because registrars offer privacy services to anybody.
Set that against the other dates. The company was incorporated in May 2022. The firm was authorised by the SRA on 29 July 2026. Every one of these domains was registered after that authorisation, and the one used to write to our client was registered six weeks after it.
Does “20 years of experience” survive that?
No, and this is the contradiction we would put at the top if we had to pick one.
The About page on a website that was thirteen days old when it was used says “over 25 years of industry experience”, and then, four lines below, “20 Years of Industry Experience”. It claims “300K+ Business Satisfied with Our Trademark Services” alongside “225+ Registered UKIPO Trademarks Through Us”. It promises a “100% Success Rate”, a “100% Satisfaction Rate”, and on its £449 package, “100% Approval Guaranteed”.
The firm behind the name has been authorised to practise for under two months. The company behind it was incorporated in 2022. Neither has ever filed a UK trademark in its own name; we checked the register. Nobody can guarantee UKIPO approval, ever, and no filing service has a 100% success rate, because refusals and oppositions are part of the system.
Three hundred thousand satisfied businesses, two hundred and twenty-five registrations, twenty-five years, twenty years, and a domain registered a fortnight ago. Those numbers cannot all be true, and most of them cannot be true at all.
What else does not add up?
1. The SRA number in the footer is not the firm’s number. The second email’s footer reads “Authorised & Regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority – Reg.No: 194985”. RSK Legal Ltd’s SRA number is 8007371. The number 194985 belongs to an individual solicitor, Chantal Marika Reid, admitted in September 2000. A person’s registration number does not authorise a company.
2. Ms Reid is not listed at RSK Legal. The SRA register lists exactly one regulated person at RSK Legal Ltd, and it is not her. Her own record says: “There are currently no practices displayed for this person.” The register therefore neither confirms nor excludes any connection between her and the firm, and we make no suggestion either way.
3. The signature changes between emails. Marika in the first, Marisa in the second. The second also contains a typo, drops the legal register entirely, and does not read as the work of the same author as the first.
4. The letterhead address is not the firm’s SRA office. The notice gives 11 Borrowby Close, Hamilton, Leicester, which is a residential street and the company’s Companies House address. The office the SRA publishes for RSK Legal Ltd is Unit 10, Leicester Business Centre, 111 Ross Walk, Leicester LE4 5HH.
5. The email came from a subdomain that appears nowhere on the website. It was sent from notice.rsklegal.co.uk. The site itself publishes an address at the plain domain.
6. The website carries no SRA number at all. We read every page. No SRA number, no firm authorisation statement, no company registration number, no registered office, no VAT number. The footer reads, in full, “Copyright © RSK Legal. All Rights Reserved.” An SRA-regulated firm is required to publish its regulatory status on its own website.
7. The website’s own terms say it is not a law firm. Word for word: “We provide general information related to trademarks and provide a website that allows you to prepare and file trademarks. We are not a law firm. We do not provide and cannot provide legal advice to you.”
8. No solicitor is named on the website. The About page describes “a team of elite and highly skilled trademark attorneys” and names none of them. No Ms Reid, no Mr Kular, no director, no staff, no photographs.
9. Two product names carry the ® symbol and are not on the UK register. We searched for “Trademark Secured®” and “Refusal Risk Meter®”. Nothing of either name appears.
10. The testimonials are unverifiable. Four, on a repeating loop, no photographs, no company names, no dates. One is about copyright registration and one about company formation, neither of which the site sells.
Is there a pre-filing verification process at the UKIPO?
No. This is the part of the letter that does not survive contact with the Act at all.
There is no pre-filing due diligence stage, and nothing obliges an applicant or their representative to write to anyone before filing. Section 38 is about publication of an accepted application and the opposition window that follows it. Sections 5 and 5(4)(a) are relative grounds, and they are raised in opposition proceedings after publication, by the owner of the earlier right, not by the new applicant’s own agent in advance. The Trade Marks Rules 2008 contain no 72-hour anything.
If somebody genuinely files an application for your brand name, you find out when it publishes in the Trade Marks Journal, and you then have two months to oppose it. That is the process. It is public, it is free to watch, and nobody has to email you about it first.
Have we asked RSK Legal about this?
Yes. We are writing to RSK Legal Ltd at the office the SRA publishes for it, and to Mr Kular as the firm’s only regulated person, setting out what we found and inviting a response.
We are also trying to find a route to Ms Reid, and this is harder than it should be. She is a real solicitor: the SRA register shows her admitted on 15 September 2000 with a current practising certificate and no published regulatory decisions. But her record displays no practice, and a search of the Law Society’s Find a Solicitor database, 217,232 legal professionals, returns nothing for her, because that database lists people through their firms. There is no published address, no firm, no contact route. We are therefore reporting the use of her registration number to the SRA, which is the right thing to do whether or not she is connected to any of this.
If anyone named here would like to respond, we will publish the response in full. This page will be updated the moment we hear anything.
What does this mean for a newly authorised law firm?
This is the part we would want a regulator to read, and it is why this page is as much a warning to solicitors as to the businesses being targeted.
Imagine the route. A law degree, the training, the qualification, the years of practice, then the application to the SRA to run your own firm, the compliance officers, the insurance, the checks. It takes most of a career. You are recognised on 29 July. You have not really started.
And somewhere in that same summer, somebody registers a domain in a name close enough to yours, stands up a website in an afternoon, and begins sending pressure letters to strangers under it. The first you know about it may well be when somebody like us publishes a page.
Your reputation is the whole asset. You cannot rebuild it the way you rebuild a website.
This is exactly why trademarks matter, and why they matter most to the people who think they are too small or too new to need one. If RSK Legal Ltd held a registered trademark for its name, it would have a document to hand Nominet and a clear route to having an abusive domain transferred or suspended.
To be precise about the mechanics, because they matter: Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service does not strictly require a registered trademark. A complainant must show two things, that they have Rights in a name identical or similar to the domain, and that the domain is an Abusive Registration in the other party’s hands, and Rights can include unregistered rights built up through use. But unregistered rights have to be proved, with evidence of trading, reputation and goodwill. A firm eight weeks old has almost none of that to show. A registration is proof you simply produce. Free mediation runs first, and a summary decision costs £200 against roughly eight to twelve weeks end to end.
So the newer the business, the more the registration is doing. That is the opposite of how most people think about it.
Is AI making this harder to spot?
Honestly, yes, and we should say so.
A credible-looking professional website used to take money and time and somebody who knew what they were doing. Now it takes an afternoon. The copy reads properly. The layout is clean. The testimonials have plausible names. The legal language in that first email is better drafted than a lot of real correspondence we see.
With every notification like this one that comes in, we are having to do more work to be confident about what we are looking at. These are not easy to spot any more, and anybody telling you to just look for bad spelling is a few years out of date.
What still gives it away is not the design. It is the practice. Numbers that contradict each other on the same page. A registration number that belongs to someone else. A signature that changes between two emails. An address that does not match the register. A guarantee nobody can give. The website is polished; the operation behind it is not, and the operation is what leaks.
That is the thing to check. Not how it looks, but what it says about itself, and whether any of it holds up.
Why does this one worry us more than the others?
Because it is a step up, and the direction of travel is not good.
The pattern in this directory has escalated year on year. It started with letters using solicitors’ names. Then companies registered under the solicitors’ SIC code, to look right on Companies House. Then the names of former solicitors, no longer practising. Then practising solicitors who have never worked in intellectual property in their lives. We have even seen the name of a deceased and thoroughly reputable IP attorney used on a demand for money.
Now we have correspondence carrying the name of a law firm that was authorised eight weeks ago, sent from a domain registered thirteen days earlier, quoting a registration number belonging to a solicitor who does not appear on that firm’s list of authorised people.
Whoever is behind this style of pressure letter appears willing to use anybody’s name. Be vigilant, and check before you reply to anything.
How do you spot your own name being used this way?
Registering a domain takes five minutes and costs less than a takeaway. Nothing checks, at the point of registration, whether the person buying a domain in your name has any right to it. The first anyone finds out is usually when a customer forwards something and asks whether it is really you.
That is why TMH Monitoring covers domain registrations and social media accounts, not only the trademark registers. A trademark watch tells you when somebody applies to register something close to your mark. It does not tell you when somebody quietly registers a domain in your name on a Tuesday and starts emailing your customers on the Friday. You want to see both, because the second one moves faster and does more damage.
If somebody is using your goodwill to take your customers, or worse, to take their money, you want to know in days.
What should you look out for?
Strip the names out and this letter has the same fingerprints as every other one in this directory. Any of these is worth a pause:
- A deadline measured in hours or days. Trademark law does not work in 72-hour windows. Urgency is the product.
- A competing applicant who is never named. If somebody really were filing against your name, the application would have a number and an owner. Ask for them.
- A regulator number in a footer. Thirty seconds on the SRA register. Check whether it returns a firm or a person, and whether the firm’s name matches the letter.
- An address that differs from the register. Compare the letterhead against the regulator’s published office and against Companies House.
- A website with no company number on it. Every UK limited company must publish its registered number and office. A regulated firm must publish its regulatory status as well.
- Check how old the website is. A free WHOIS lookup tells you when a domain was registered. A firm advertising twenty years of experience on a domain registered last month is telling you something.
- A formal notice with no offer in it. If the letter only becomes a sales pitch once you reply and ask what it is about, that sequence is the tell.
The same shape has turned up in the warnings we have published on St Nic’s Legal Services, Knighton Legal Services and MA & Co Law. Our guide on how to spot trademark scams before they cost you covers the pattern in full, and the complete directory is at trademark scams.
What should you do if you have had one?
Do not reply to the deadline. Nothing happens at hour 73.
Send it to us and we will check it for free. Call 0800 077 8830 or forward the letter and we will tell you what the registers actually show for whoever wrote to you, the same way we did here. No charge, no obligation.
Report it. The IPO collects these at misleadinginvoices@ipo.gov.uk and publishes guidance on misleading trademark payment requests. If money has changed hands, report it to Action Fraud on 0300 123 2040. If a regulated firm’s name or a solicitor’s registration number has been used, the SRA wants to know.
Stop it happening again. Most of these letters arrive because the sender scraped a name and address off a public register. Our Care of Address service puts our address on your trademark record instead of yours, so the letters come to us and never reach your desk. TMH Monitoring watches the domains and social accounts being registered around your brand, so you see the website before your customers do.
The email in full
Reproduced as it arrived. Our client’s name, email address and brand name are redacted; everything else, including the typos, is exactly as sent.
From: chantal@notice.rsklegal.co.uk
Date: Monday 21 September 2026, 13:41
Subject: Formal Notice Regarding Potential Business Name Rights
Hello [CLIENT NAME REDACTED],
This correspondence constitutes a formal verification notice issued by the Trademark Division of RSK Legal in relation to a proposed trademark application for the mark “[CLIENT BRAND]”, which is presently undergoing our pre-filing due diligence and verification procedures prior to any formal submission to the UK Intellectual Property Office (“UKIPO”).
The proposed application remains under internal review and has not yet been submitted to the UKIPO. In accordance with our pre-filing due diligence obligations, and having regard to the Trade Marks Act 1994, including, where relevant, Sections 5, 5(4)(a) and 38, together with the Trade Marks Rules 2008, we are required to make reasonable enquiries to determine whether any earlier rights or competing commercial interests exist which may be material before our verification process is concluded.
Accordingly, we request that you confirm, within 72 hours of receipt of this notice, whether: You or your organisation have used, or are presently using, the name “[CLIENT BRAND]” within the United Kingdom; and/or You assert any legal, commercial, equitable or other protectable interest in that name.
Yours Faithfully,
Chantal Marika Reid
Registered IP Solicitor
11 Borrowby Close, Hamilton, Leicester LE5 1WQ, England.
SRA: 194985
Phone: +44 1163930377
Website: https://rsklegal.co.uk/
Our client replied to ask what the notice was actually about. This came back the same day.
Yes, the other applicant wnats to register [CLIENT BRAND] as the trademark, and we are contacting you because you appear to be the primary/prior user of this name. If you wish to retain ownership and secure the name for your business, please let us know. We can assist you with the process of registering the name as a UK trade mark with the UKIPO before the other applicant proceeds further.
Yours sincerely,
Chantal Marisa ReidRSK Legal | T +44 1163930377 | https://rsklegal.co.uk/
Authorised & Regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority – Reg.No: 194985
Have you had one of these?
We build these pages from what our clients forward to us. If something has landed in your inbox that reads like this one, send it over, redact whatever you like, and we will look into it properly. The more specimens we see, the faster the next warning goes up.
