The Bombay High Court has allowed Colgate-Palmolive to bring six renewed trademark registration certificates onto the record in its 1996 infringement suit against Anchor Health and Beauty Care Private Limited, ruling that the late-tendered documents cannot be dismissed as irrelevant.

Justice Somasekhar Sundaresan, hearing the dispute, observed that "Colgate has paid a disproportionate price for its attorneys' failure to have tabled the six LPCs on July 10, 2019 ." Nevertheless, the court declined to impose costs on the company, accepting the certificates as relevant to the issues framed in the suit.

The six certificates, issued by the Trade Marks Registry in July 2019, will now be marked as Exhibits P-50 to P-55. Two additional certificates will be marked as Exhibits P-56 and P-57. The parties are required to appear before the court commissioner within a week of the order being uploaded for directions on further proceedings.

A 1996 suit, a 2019 production gap

Colgate-Palmolive Company and Colgate-Palmolive (India) Limited filed the suit on October 29, 1996, seeking injunctions against trademark infringement and passing off, along with damages. The case concerns the validity and subsistence of certain trademark registrations held by Colgate, which Anchor disputed.

The immediate controversy arose from a procedural gap. Colgate tendered six renewed Legal Proceedings Certificates—commonly referred to as LPCs—before a court commissioner on August 7, 2019. The Trade Marks Registry had issued the certificates on July 2 and July 3 of that year. But when Colgate's witness affidavit was taken on record on July 10, 2019, the certificates were not produced before the court. Anchor objected to their admission at that stage.

Colgate moved an application on August 26, 2019, seeking to have the certificates admitted into evidence. The court directed that cross-examination of Colgate's witness could continue only after the admission application was decided.

Anchor's objections centered on authenticity. It questioned whether the certificates could be traced to the original Registry files, pointing to difficulties with reconstructed records. Anchor argued, in effect, that the late production and the condition of the Registry records made the certificates unreliable.

Relevant, but not yet authentic

The court held that the certificates were relevant to the issues framed in the suit, particularly whether five trademark registrations were valid and subsisting. The sixth registration was already represented by an exhibit on record. Relevance, the court said, did not depend on proving the documents' authenticity at the admission stage.

The court looked to Sections 31 and 137 of the Trade Marks Act, 1999. Registration, the court observed, constitutes prima facie evidence of validity in all legal proceedings. Certified entries in the register can be admitted without further proof or production of the original. That statutory framework supported admission of the Registry-issued LPCs.

At the same time, the court made clear that admitting the certificates does not establish their authenticity or the truth of their contents. Anchor can still challenge the Registry records and contest the evidentiary weight of the certificates at trial. What Anchor cannot do, the court said, is reopen the question of the mode of proof—the procedural channel through which the certificates are brought into evidence.

The distinction matters practically. Colgate won the threshold battle to have the documents placed before the court, but Anchor is not foreclosed from attacking their substance. The authenticity dispute may now be fought out during cross-examination and final arguments rather than at the admissibility stage.

A costly delay, but no costs order

The judge's observation that Colgate had "paid a disproportionate price" drew attention to the consequences of the company's attorneys' failure to table the LPCs on July 10, 2019. The delayed tender triggered Anchor's objection, stalled the cross-examination of Colgate's witness, and turned what should have been a routine production of registry certificates into a contested interlocutory application.

Despite that, the court declined to saddle Colgate with costs. The ruling suggests that the late filing was treated as a procedural lapse by counsel rather than a deliberate attempt to gain an advantage. The absence of a costs order also leaves the substantive dispute—Colgate's infringement claims and Anchor's challenge to the registrations—to be resolved on the merits.

Next stop: the court commissioner

The order clears the way for cross-examination of Colgate's witness to resume before the court commissioner. Both parties must appear within a week of the order's upload to seek directions. The six renewed certificates will form part of the evidence along with two additional certificates, extending the documentary record in a case that has already been pending for nearly three decades.

For trademark litigants, the ruling is a reminder that registration certificates carry statutory evidentiary value and may be admitted even when tendered late, provided they are relevant. But it also underscores the limits of such an order: admission is not authentication. A party resisting the documents may still challenge the underlying registry records and test the weight of the certificates at trial.

The immediate focus now shifts to the commissioner's proceedings, where the course of cross-examination and the practical handling of the newly admitted exhibits will be worked out. With the admissibility dispute resolved, the suit can move toward the remaining stages of trial.