Nursing home chain claims abuse at hands of lawyers

The television commercials for two Arkansas attorneys who are willing to represent plaintiffs against nursing homes have caused an uproar with one nursing home chain.

Golden Gate National Senior Care LLC of Fort Smith recently sued attorneys J. Scott Davidson of Batesville and Thomas G. Buchanan of Little Rock and accused them of false adverting and trademark infringement for running ads for the law firm they operate, Davidson & Buchanan, that featured the chain’s Golden Living Center logos, according to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court.

“This commercial threatens immediate harm to Golden Living’s reputation and is an abuse of our client’s trademark rights,” Philadelphia attorney Glenn Gundersen wrote in a June 4 letter to the Arkansas attorneys, which is filed in the lawsuit.

He demanded the Golden Living name be taken out of the ads.

Davidson fired back a letter to Gundersen on June 7 and said “the commercial is neither misleading, nor does it constitute an abuse of your client’s trademark rights.”

Still, he said the ad would be revised by June 10.

But Golden Gate didn’t wait that long. It filed the lawsuit against the lawyers on June 8.

Golden Gate wants the attorneys to stop using the nursing homes’ logo in its ads and pay an unspecified amount of damages.

Brian Brooks, an attorney in Greenbrier who is representing Davidson and Buchanan, wouldn’t comment on the merits of the suit. But he said the suit was an attempt to “muzzle these guys from getting cases to bring to light what Golden did while they were here before they sold all their homes [in Arkansas in 2009],” Brooks said.

Brooks also said the ad had been changed.

Golden still operates more than 300 nursing homes and assisted living centers in 21 states.