What is a TRO?
Short answer: a TRO (Temporary Restraining Order) is an emergency court order, obtained by a brand before you know a lawsuit exists, that forces marketplaces and payment providers to freeze your account and funds immediately.
In e-commerce IP enforcement, the sequence is almost always: the brand files a sealed complaint → the judge grants an ex parte TRO (no hearing, no notice to you) → Amazon / Walmart / eBay / PayPal / Payoneer receive the order and freeze everything → you find out when your dashboard locks. By the time you see it, the freeze is already in force.
What is a “Schedule A” lawsuit?
Short answer: one lawsuit, hundreds of defendants. The defendant list is a sealed attachment — “Schedule A” — so no seller can see it coming.
Schedule A cases are mass IP lawsuits perfected in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois (Chicago), which alone accounts for 2,689 of the cases in our database — more than the next four courts combined. A single complaint typically names 50–500 storefronts allegedly selling goods that infringe one brand's trademarks, copyrights or design patents.
2026 trend: filings are exploding. Our database recorded
324 new cases in January 2026 and
1,243 in July 2026 — a 283% jump in seven months. Full monthly data:
E-commerce IP Lawsuit Statistics.
Why was my account frozen without any warning?
Short answer: you were almost certainly named in a sealed Schedule A case, and a TRO was served on the marketplace before you were served.
What to do in the first 48 hours:
- Find the case. Search your storefront name and brand keywords against a TRO case database, and check every email inbox (including spam) for a service notice with a case number.
- Do not ignore the deadline. TROs convert to preliminary injunctions quickly; default judgment can follow and your frozen balance can be awarded to the plaintiff.
- Quantify the frozen funds across all accounts and processors — this drives settlement math.
- Get representation or negotiate. Most Schedule A cases end in settlement; a small frozen balance sometimes isn't worth defending, a large one almost always is.
How much do these cases settle for?
Short answer: typically a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars, often anchored to a percentage of your frozen balance.
Plaintiff firms run these cases at volume — a handful of firms file most of them. The most prolific filer, Greer, Burns & Crain (GBC), is linked to roughly 5,900 of our tracked cases. Volume filing means formulaic settlement playbooks: demands scale with what was frozen, and negotiation is expected.
How do I avoid being named in the first place?
Short answer: screen every listing — brand names, keywords, artwork and product images — against a live lawsuit database before publishing. Most named sellers had detectable risk in the listing itself.
The practical checklist we built our product around:
- Brand & keyword screening: check titles, bullet points and descriptions against brands with active or past TRO enforcement (18,726 cases) and against 8.65 million USPTO trademark records — including ambiguous generic words that happen to be registered marks.
- Image screening: reverse-search your product images against artwork and design patents already asserted in litigation (17.67 million patent images indexed).
- Repeat-enforcer awareness: treat brands like Chrysler, UGG, GM, and character franchises (Minions, Shrek, NARUTO) as hair-trigger enforcers — never use their names or artwork without authorization.
- Store-wide audits: re-scan your whole catalog periodically; new lawsuits are filed daily (about 40 per day in July 2026).
SafeSell AI provides these checks as free and paid tools for cross-border sellers: see what we do (English overview).