Why AI‑Driven Brand Abuse is Reshaping Brand Protection for Law Firms
IA | Marques
avril 2, 2026
By Timmi Kleinnibbelink Rysgaard, Brand Protection, Product Owner
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has massively changed digital brand abuse. Whether it is counterfeiting or digital impersonation, what once required a coordinated plan and approach from a wide-ranging counterfeit network can now be achieved by bad actors armed with AI tools.
Creating cloned websites, faking marketplaces, and generating lookalike trademarks now happen overnight, putting brands under more pressure than ever before. To stay ahead, the tools and strategies used to protect brands need to evolve just as fast.
At INTA 2026, the agenda will reflect this shift towards AI, with sessions focused on anticounterfeiting strategy, IP enforcement, and increased brand vulnerability.
For law firms, the challenges require new approaches, with AI playing a role on both sides. The speed with which AI can create is already proving crucial in supporting the generation of new patents and trademarks, but with it comes more fakes, more knock-offs and more fraudulent sites to protect against.
The Acceleration of Digital Infringement
For many years, digital counterfeiters relied primarily on online marketplaces to distribute infringing goods - a maze of hard-to-track online products sold across a huge range of websites. While these marketplaces remain a major channel and point of focus for counterfeiters, the transformation from AI is the rapid appearance and growth of AI‑generated cloned domains.
Thanks to AI tools, counterfeiters can now recreate a brand’s website in minutes. This huge decrease in the time spent designing individual sites means that scammers can launch hundreds of fake storefronts using template‑based systems and generative design tools. These sites can mimic a brand’s entire online presence, from product photography to customer service copy, with accuracy that even very aware customers can miss.
Hard to Spot Domain Abuse
Domain monitoring is already a significant brand protection focus, but it has regained huge prominence due to AI‑enabled infringement. In addition to how easy AI tools have made it to generate hundreds of websites in moments, the variations that they are using to differentiate themselves are also incredibly small.
Like with the counterfeit products themselves, which may look like the original unless analyzed under a microscope, these domains often contain very minor spelling deviations. These domains are then often tied to phishing pages, fraudulent checkouts, or fake customer‑support operations intended to extract money or data.
For law firms overseeing global trademark portfolios, this creates a new major focus. Brands increasingly expect their outside counsel to monitor domain registrations and digital impersonation as part of their brand protection strategy.
Marketplace Enforcement is Evolving, But Slowly
Major traditional selling platforms like Amazon, eBay, and others, which have typically been the place to get counterfeit products, have spent time and money to strengthen their brand protection programs in recent years. Many have rolled out portals enabling trademarks to be submitted and evidence provided through semi‑automated workflows. But there is still a problem for law firms: marketplaces remain reactive, and they are not obligated to police infringement until notified.
This means brands still need a way to continuously detect infringing listings at scale, ensuring that these notifications are being flagged to the relevant platforms as soon as possible so that the takedown process can begin.
At the same time, a new wave of e‑commerce platforms, particularly social‑commerce ecosystems like TikTok Shop, has worsened the counterfeiting challenge for law firms. As TikTok became the fastest‑growing online retailer in 2024, increasing its shopper base by 131%, counterfeiters quickly exposed its viral content model to push imitation goods at speed that many brands struggle to keep up with and target.
With the number of products now being created, the expectation for law firms to keep up with this fast-moving landscape manually, both for new domains and marketplaces, is almost impossible.
That’s where AI comes in. Manual workflows simply do not scale against AI-driven infringement.
Why Brands Are Turning to Their Law Firms for Brand Protection
One of the impacts of the rapidly shifting scale and focus of counterfeiters is that law firms are now increasingly looking for platforms such as Anaqua’s to help support them in brand protection. While in-house teams are still major users of these sorts of tools, it’s becoming increasingly clear that law firms must be able to prove their grasp of, and ability to combat, these counterfeiting strategies.
This is an almost impossible task to complete manually, which is why AI tools offer such upsides in this process. Within modern platforms, these tools form a distinct brand protection layer that sits on top of the IPMS foundation, connected for data consistency, but clearly separated in terms of function and day‑to‑day workflow.
The shift is also client‑driven. Many companies, especially those without dedicated brand protection teams, simply cannot manage the scale of infringement they now face. Without automated systems, they are left with labor‑intensive processes such as manual searches, complaint drafting and tracking responses across many platforms.
As the volume and complexity of infringements continue to exceed what in‑house teams can absorb, law firms are increasingly becoming central to brand protection workflows. Beyond having the capacity to scale, firms bring specialized enforcement expertise and established processes for cross‑platform takedowns, both of which make them the natural partners to absorb this increased burden.
Why This Work Matters
As INTA and global enforcement bodies continue to emphasize the economic impact of counterfeiting, with counterfeit goods accounting for an estimated $467 billion in global trade in 2021, according to a 2025 report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). But there is another important reason why targeting these counterfeiters is such a worthwhile enterprise for brands.
Often not talked about, but potentially damaging to brand image, counterfeit products can also be dangerous to the consumer. Whether its clothing that includes materials or products that can cause skin problems, or toys that have been improperly designed and produced and so create choking hazards, the need to reduce the number of fake products in the market goes beyond financial implication.
Concerns over the working conditions of those making knock-off products are also well documented, especially in the clothing industry. As a result of these concerns, law firms increasingly are recognizing that brand protection intersects with corporate responsibility and ESG considerations.
Meaningful brand protection therefore hinges on an ongoing workflow: identifying infringements, evaluating their impact, assigning priority, and then executing enforcement actions that combine automation with specialist review, to keep brands separated from dangerous counterfeits.
What Law Firms Must Prepare for This Year and Beyond
As counterfeiting domains rise rapidly worldwide, law firms must access platforms and tools that automate the workflows involved in hunting down fraudulent websites. With so much digital impersonation and synthetic products, firms relying on manual models will struggle. They need tools that scrape the web for newly appearing sites to support growing client expectations in marketplace surveillance and domain monitoring.
As some creators now use AI to design the very copyrighted products firms to defend, questions over copyrightability further increase the need for AI tools that can access documentation and flag concerns. Automation will be essential, as law firms unable to analyze thousands of infringements or identify repeat offenders will lose a step compared to forward‑thinking law firms looking to deploy AI tools that build proactive brand protection programs.
With AI enabling faster counterfeiting of domains and products, brand protection becomes a core pillar of trademark practice. Firms that integrate technology now to help them guide clients through AI‑related and accelerated risks will emerge as leaders, while others risk falling behind.
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