Dan Aykroyd and my dearest friend John Alexander, who’s an artist—Dan, of course, is the famous comedian—had a case against Ka Tequila.

Dan and John went into the liquor business, and John had an idea of selling tequila in a skull-shaped bottle. Dan couldn’t do that because he has the tequila license for Canada with Patrón. So, they put vodka in it, and it became Crystal Head Vodka, which now has a very large following.

Somewhere along the way, two years after Dan and John came to market—and it took a lot of money, time, and effort—they launched with a very big, no pun intended, splash and started selling wildly. Then Ka Tequila came along.

Ka Tequila was a company owned by a woman named Kim Brandi. Kim sold her tequila in a skull-shaped bottle, and if you tilted the bottles just right, on the surface, they were identical. Now, she had painted it up to make it look different, but the similarities were too great in the structure of the bottle.

Oddly enough, there had never been an alcoholic beverage sold in a skull-shaped bottle. You’d think there would be, but there hadn’t been. So, Dan and John had the trademark, they had the rights, and she had clearly infringed.

It was tried initially, and I won’t even tell you the name of the law firm that tried it, but they lost. To their credit, they reversed it on appeal. Dan and John came to me and asked me to try the case, which I did.

An important part of this case, which you can find on Above the Law if you Google “booze and Dan Aykroyd,” recounts the story of Kim Brandi. During the first trial, she told a very sympathetic story, claiming she had no opportunity to copy their bottle. She said she had done it at the last minute, got her bottle done before theirs came to market, and could not have been copying because she was distracted by the loss of her daughter.

Dan Aykroyd’s wife told him at the time, “We’ve lost.” It was such a sympathetic story that jurors were crying.

We did some background research. In the second trial, during cross-examination, I asked her, “Ms. Brandi, you’ve told us in this case that your bottles look similar and that you lost your daughter. I don’t mean to be insensitive, but I need to know the date of your daughter’s death for our timeline.”

She responded, “Mr. Burg, you don’t understand.”

I replied, “Yes, I do. Your daughter’s not dead.”

In fact, she had been lying about it. The jury’s heads snapped back, as did some of my colleagues, whom I hadn’t told about this in advance.

This led to a chapter in the second edition of my book, The Trial Lawyer, entitled “Not Even Death Is Certain.” Lawyers have to be skeptics.

We got a willful infringement finding, legal fees, and actually shut her down worldwide with that injunction.