THE BANK of Ireland in Dublin has told "The Bank of Ireland" in San Francisco to change its name or else.
You cannot get a bank draft in the San Francisco "bank" but you can get a draft Guinness because it is a bar and restaurant run by two Dubliners, Chris Martin and Rory Connolly since it opened last January. But for the real bank's lawyers, 200 years of banking tradition is being flouted by its name adorning a premises "with a traditional whitewashed cottage look", where there is a Ladies' Night, a Beer of the Week and Traditional Sessions.
To add insult to injury, the real bank was being asked to sponsor a Christmas party in the pub "bank" for staff and friends from the nearby Irish Consulate.
Last August the real bank's legal adviser wrote to Martin and Connolly to express its concern that "you are currently doing business in some form under its trade name without authorisation". The bank has an "exclusive common law right to its name", has been operating under its name for more than 200 years and has spent "millions of dollars promoting its name and the services it delivers under that name both in the United States and abroad."
To spare the pub owners and the bank the "unpleasantness add expense" of a lawsuit, the owners were urged to contact the bank's US lawyers, Sullivan and Cromwell, with a view to "an amicable solution to this problem".
The pub owners' idea of a solution was to seek $20,000 to compensate for the expense of changing the name on their Internet website, on menus, Tshirts letterheads etc. This claim provoked Sullivan and Cromwell to reply to the pub's lawyer that "you will not be surprised to learn that the Bank has no intention of paying your clients to stop misappropriating its name".
The figure put forward for changing the name on the Internet site is "insupportable", Sullivan and Cromwell said, and the cost for the other items are "equally unrealistic, unless perhaps your clients are hand printing their menus on aged vellum and making their Tshirts out of cashmere". The lawyers said that to see the dispute as a profit opportunity "can lead to a lawsuit that will be interesting and profitable for the lawyers, aggravating and costly for else."
The San Francisco entrepreneurs have sent back a response through their declining to negotiate further "Your client has not bothered register its name in the United States or California. It has not bothered to secure a website for itself and has "no presence west of New York", claims the lawyer.
If the real bank "should legislation, we will seek for filing a frivolous action," eating and drinking bank warns.
The public relations director the Bank of Ireland in Dublin, David Holden, told The Irish Times that there is "litigation in course and it is very important to the Bank of Ireland to protect its name in all circumstances.
And there the battle of the banks stands.