In this case it seems it went a bit beyond the Trademark defense department. Wording in the Energizer suit implies that engineering got involved and they don't think the product even has technical merit (i.e. fraudulent/exaggerated claims) , and hence could potentially hurt Energizer reputation technically as well.
If you're referring to the statements like:
14. Upon information and belief, the product identified by Applied-For Marks, however, does not actually raise or increase the stored energy of the battery. Instead, as indicated in Applicant’s recitation of goods, the identified product merely provides access to existing stored energy found within the battery, i.e., “sleeve to be used with disposable batteries to extract stored energy and extend battery life.” (Emphasis added).
15. This deception is material because it relates to a character, quality or function of the identified product and because prospective purchasers are likely to believe that the deception actually describes the product.
... these are part of Energizer's opposition to the proposed Batteriser trademark made by Batteroo. This is with the US Patent and Trademark Office, it is not a regular lawsuit (unless I've missed some reference to an some other case than the trademark opposition), it is a matter for the USPTO's Trademark Trial & Appeal Board. Energizer is telling the USPTO that they should not grant the proposed trademark to Batteroo because the mark they have applied for is confusingly similar to many of Energizer's marks, that Batteroo have been engaged in publically making questionable to fraudulent marketing claims about the capabilities of their products, etc. etc.
I'm not a IP lawyer but my father did trademark searches for lawfirms for many years and I was around while working on projects preparing for lawsuits, etc. so I do have some insight into the industry. The only time I've ever been to Washington, DC, I was accompanying my father to a trademarks convention held by the USPTO in '94. (I did all the IT and management work for the servers, systems and software in our offices where we had local copies of the entire US and Canadian trademark databases including design marks in graphical form that we used for searching and I did things like the updates which were sent on CD-ROM sets every couple of weeks which had to be merged into the local database, etc... This is late '80s through to the mid '90s, before they made that stuff available on the internet and it required some fairly significant computing hardware, especially large HDDs and banks of CD-ROM drives for the time period... I still have one of the very first 1X speed Philips and some of the 1X TEAC SCSI CD-ROM drives we used for loading the updates. Believe me, even the upgrade to a stack of six Panasonic model 562 2X CD-ROM drives made those updates a
lot quicker! 300K/sec was twice as fast! Wheee!!
)
We did searches for people preparing to register a mark to try to be sure they would not have things that were likely to cause opposition or at least know what might be potentially confusing, etc. as well as monitoring for holders of existing marks and pulling information for markholders preparing to oppose pending applications or for those preparing to defend their marks.
It was actually really quite interesting stuff to be involved with but the search services we provided essentially became obsolete once the internet became popular and that information was made available online by the various trademark offices. (Though, our search software was better at doing the actual searching, especially for design marks.) That part of the business quickly dried up and by the later '90s we weren't doing anything with trademarks anymore.
If there are any actual trademark lawyers in the crowd, please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong!
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