Glossary
French: assignation en contrefaçon de marque
The assignation en contrefaçon de marque is the legal act that starts a trademark infringement lawsuit in France. Functionally, it combines what a US litigator knows as the complaint and the service of process: it is a single document that both states the case and is formally served on the defendant.
The writ is drafted by the trademark attorney and delivered to the defendant by a commissaire de justice (judicial officer, formerly called huissier de justice — often translated “bailiff”). Its purpose is to inform the defendant that the plaintiff is bringing the case before the Tribunal judiciaire (the French civil court with jurisdiction over trademark matters) to have the defendant held liable for infringement and, most often, ordered to pay damages. Jurisdiction is concentrated rather than spread across every local court: French law channels EU trademark infringement claims into a small number of designated Tribunaux judiciaires, with the Paris Tribunal judiciaire handling the large majority of the caseload.
Because French procedure front-loads the argument (see below), most infringement claims are preceded by a saisie-contrefaçon: a judicial seizure carried out by a commissaire de justice at the alleged infringer’s premises, warehouse or point of sale, under a court order obtained without prior notice to the target. The seizure secures samples, invoices, stock records and sometimes accounting documents before the defendant is even aware that litigation is coming. Rather than developing the factual record through discovery after the complaint is filed, as would happen in a US federal case, French counsel typically builds the writ directly on what the seizure uncovers. See evidence of infringement in France for how this fits into the broader enforcement toolkit.
Two points matter in practice:
Timing also matters upstream of the writ: infringement claims are generally subject to a five-year limitation period (Art. L.716-4-2 of the French Intellectual Property Code) running from the date the owner knew or should have known of the infringing acts — the same period discussed on this site as the statute of limitations. Waiting too long to convert a cease-and-desist campaign into an assignation can extinguish otherwise valid claims for the earliest acts.
The assignation collapses two separate US steps — the Rule 8 complaint and Rule 4 service of process — into a single document, served by a judicial officer rather than a process server chosen by the plaintiff. The more consequential difference is evidentiary sequencing: US notice pleading lets a complaint state claims in general terms and rely on discovery to develop the facts, while the assignation must already read like a substantiated brief, typically built on evidence the saisie-contrefaçon has already secured. There is also no US equivalent to caducité — the risk that a validly served writ never becomes a live case because it was not filed with the court clerk in time.
Consider a US cosmetics company that discovers a French retailer selling goods bearing a confusingly similar mark. French counsel would typically secure a saisie-contrefaçon first, then draft the assignation around that evidence and serve it through a commissaire de justice — a sequence that is largely complete before a comparable US case would even reach the discovery stage.
You will run into the assignation en contrefaçon whenever an enforcement strategy in France moves from letters to court: see trademark infringement litigation in France for the overall roadmap, evidence of infringement in France for the seizure and investigation tools that feed the writ, and trademark litigation in France for how the case proceeds once filed. On the glossary side, see trademark infringement and saisie-contrefaçon.