What a Responsible Schedule A Filing Actually Looks Like (Most Aren't)
Earlier this year, IPWatchdog published a piece laying out best practices for Schedule A litigation, the mass online enforcement actions that join dozens or sometimes hundreds of foreign e-commerce sellers in a single federal lawsuit. It's written from the plaintiff's side, by the kind of practitioner who files these cases for a living, and it reads like a genuine attempt to clean up an area of practice that has earned a reputation for being run a little fast and loose.
I read it the way I read most things written by people on the other side of a fight I've spent years in: with real interest, and with a healthy amount of suspicion that the model being described and the model that actually plays out in court are not quite the same thing.
What the playbook says
The recommended practices focus heavily on notice. Under the playbook, a defendant gets served electronically: the complaint, the summons, the temporary restraining order, the screenshot evidence, and a link to a dedicated service website all get emailed to whatever address the seller listed on their storefront. The service website is supposed to clearly identify the case, list upcoming deadlines, and provide the plaintiff's counsel's contact information so a defendant can actually reach a human being.
On paper, that sounds reasonable. It sounds like due process dressed up for the internet age. The problem is that "on paper reasonable" and "what actually happens to the seller on the other end" are two very different stories, and the playbook doesn't grapple with either of the two gaps that matter most.
Problem one: nobody actually opens that email
Email service works when the recipient checks the inbox it's sent to, recognizes the sender as legitimate, and understands what they're looking at. None of those three things can be assumed for a Schedule A defendant.
These cases overwhelmingly target small sellers operating out of overseas marketplaces, often through storefronts run by a handful of people juggling dozens of SKUs and customer service channels. The email address on file is frequently a generic support inbox, sometimes shared across several store accounts, sometimes barely monitored at all. An email arriving from an unfamiliar U.S. law firm, with legal terminology a non-native English speaker has never encountered, sitting next to the usual flood of spam and phishing attempts that every e-commerce seller's inbox is already drowning in, does not reliably get opened, let alone understood, let alone acted on within the tight window a federal TRO demands.
This isn't a hypothetical concern. It's the exact reason default judgments are the dominant outcome in Schedule A litigation. The vast majority of named defendants never appear, never respond, and never know a federal case existed against them until their marketplace account is frozen and their funds are gone. A notice model can call itself best practice all it wants. If the actual rate of defendants who receive, read, and understand that notice is low, the practice isn't protecting anyone. It's providing the appearance of due process to satisfy a court's checklist while the substance of fair notice never happens.
And the appellate courts are starting to say so directly, at least for defendants in mainland China, which is where a large share of Schedule A defendants are located. In December 2025, the Second Circuit ruled in a Baby Shark counterfeiting case that the Hague Service Convention simply does not permit service by email on Chinese defendants when their physical address is known, because China has objected to the treaty provision that some courts had been stretching to cover email. The Seventh Circuit, which covers the Northern District of Illinois and therefore covers an enormous share of Schedule A filings, agreed in June 2026, holding in equally blunt terms that the Convention is "mandatory and exclusive" where it applies and that email service outside its terms isn't a permissible shortcut just because it's faster. [Note: I had already submitted an article for publication that the Seventh Circuit should not follow the Second Circuit…I was obviously beat to the punch on that] Two circuits, including the one that actually hears most of these cases with the second hearing a large portion, have now said that the email-and-a-link model the plaintiff's bar is calling best practice may not satisfy the rules of civil procedure at all, not just that it fails to reach people in any practical sense.
That matters for a defendant well beyond the academic question of which treaty provision controls. If service was never proper to begin with, a default judgment built on top of it is vulnerable, and a frozen marketplace account that resulted from it may not have been frozen lawfully.
Problem two: nobody bought anything from most of these defendants
The second gap is the one that should bother judges more than it currently seems to. Schedule A complaints typically join dozens of unrelated sellers in one filing, all accused of selling infringing or counterfeit goods. The evidentiary backbone for many of these joined defendants is a screenshot: a product listing, a thumbnail, a description that looks similar enough to the protected mark or design to support an allegation.
A screenshot is not a test purchase. A test purchase tells you what actually arrived in a box: whether the product is genuinely counterfeit, a knockoff, a licensed product sold without authorization, a totally unrelated item that got swept in by an overzealous keyword search, or something that turns out to be perfectly legitimate. Plaintiffs in these cases routinely do not buy from every defendant named in a single complaint. They buy from a sample, sometimes just one or two sellers, and then extend the allegations and the TRO to everyone else on the list based on similarity of listing language or product images.
That's a meaningful evidentiary shortcut, and it's the kind of shortcut that some judges, particularly in the Northern District of Illinois, have started pushing back on hard, demanding individualized specificity rather than allowing a single test purchase to stand in for dozens of unverified ones. A best-practices playbook for plaintiffs that doesn't address how to actually verify each named defendant's conduct, rather than just how to notify them more cleanly, is solving the part of the problem that makes the litigation look better without solving the part that makes it fair. And, after a Seventh Circuit decision vacating defaults where there are not actual purchases—the best practice would be to make lots of purchases.
Why this matters if you're the one who got named
If you're a seller who just discovered your Amazon, Etsy, or AliExpress storefront has been frozen because of a Schedule A complaint, the gap between "we served you properly" and "you actually had a fair chance to respond" is exactly where your defense lives. Courts that take seriously the question of whether you got real notice, and whether the plaintiff ever actually verified that you, specifically, sold what you're accused of selling, are courts where these cases start falling apart on the defendant's behalf.
The plaintiff's bar publishing its own best-practices guide is a sign that the worst excesses of this litigation are getting enough judicial attention that even the people filing these cases feel the need to clean up their public image. That's progress, in a limited sense. But a playbook that improves the optics of notice without improving the substance of notice, and that says nothing about verifying allegations defendant-by-defendant before freezing someone's livelihood, is not the reform it's being presented as. It's a better-dressed version of the same machine.
This isn't an argument that Schedule A litigation shouldn't exist
I want to be clear about what I'm criticizing here, because it isn't the existence of mass online enforcement actions. Brand owners have a real problem: their marks and designs get ripped off by dozens of overseas storefronts simultaneously, and chasing each one in a separate lawsuit isn't realistic. Schedule A litigation, done correctly, is a legitimate tool for that problem, and I've represented brand owners using it, not just sellers defending against it.
Done correctly means an actual test purchase or comparable individualized evidence behind each defendant named in the complaint, not a screenshot extrapolated across forty unrelated storefronts. It means service that has a real chance of reaching the person being sued, which increasingly means doing the Hague Convention work the Second and Seventh Circuits just confirmed the rules actually require, rather than treating email as a free shortcut around it. None of that makes the case slower than it needs to be or less effective at stopping real infringement. It just makes it fair, and it makes the resulting judgment durable instead of vulnerable to being unwound later because the plaintiff cut corners to save a few weeks and a few dollars.
The cut-throat, sloppy version of this litigation, the one built on bulk screenshots and a mass email blast, isn't faster because it's smarter. It's faster because it skips the steps that protect against suing the wrong person, and it gets away with that mostly because the defendants on the other end rarely have the resources to push back. That's not a model worth defending, whichever side of the case you're on.
My name is Jonathan Phillips. I handle Schedule A matters on both sides: brand owners who need real enforcement against genuine counterfeiters, and sellers who have been swept into a mass filing without ever getting a fair chance to respond. If you're facing either situation, I'd be glad to talk it through. You can contact me HERE.