For the longest time, the life of a lawyer’s cease and desist letter was an unpleasant one. For one, the letter was typically written too quickly to allow for important considerations such as, oh, readability and persuasion. And oftentimes, cease and desist letters were full of bluster and, shall we say, questionable assertions of law and fact. But the cruelest injustice for our old pal the cease and desist letter was that it was often banished to a life of loneliness during which it never truly saw the world. While it was being drafted, it probably only jumped from one lawyer’s desk or computer to another lawyer’s desk or computer, with a rare detour to a client’s desk or computer. Once it was sent to its recipient, it likely spent its time in the dark corner of a manila envelope, redweld or email inbox. It was surely an unpleasant life.

But alas, times have changed for our dear friend. In the past few years, lawyers’ cease and desist letters—and responses to the letters—have been much more likely to receive media interest and public interest. Emerging out of the shadows of their drafters and recipients, some cease and desist letters have themselves recently been the stars of news articles and blog posts.

  • In December 2017, Anheuser Busch hired an actor to play a town crier and deliver an oral cease and desist letter in person to a Minneapolis brewery that launched a beer whose name was the tagline of a new Bud Light advertising campaign. The video of the actor’s reading went viral, providing goodwill, publicity and marketing buzz to Anheuser Busch.
  • In September 2017, Netflix’s in-house legal counsel was publicly lauded for the company’s cease and desist letter targeting a Chicago pop-up bar whose theme was based on a popular Netflix program. The letter was written with a gentle tone and included a number of references to that very program.
  • That same month, a New Jersey restaurant group responded to a cease and desist letter from a “certain unnamed chicken brand” by renaming its “Chick Philly” sandwich the “Cease and Desist,” and serving the sandwich in a wrapper that displayed snippets of the original letter.
  • In October 2016, The New York Times responded to a cease and desist letter written by a lawyer for Donald Trump concerning a recently published article about accusations of inappropriate sexual touching on the part of Trump. The newspaper’s response was widely circulated on the internet, in part because of memorable sentences such as “Nothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself.”