Luke Combs Lawsuit: $250K Judgment, Response, and Aftermath

In late 2023, country singer Luke Combs’ attorneys won a $250,000 federal court judgment against Nicol Harness, a disabled Florida woman who had sold 18 homemade tumblers bearing his name and image for $20 each. The Luke Combs tumbler lawsuit became national news after a Tampa television station reported the disparity between her roughly $380 in sales and the quarter-million-dollar penalty. Combs said he had been unaware of the case, publicly apologized, had Harness removed from the suit, and paid her more than the funds Amazon had frozen in her seller account.

What the Lawsuit Was About

The complaint was filed in October 2023 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and named 46 defendants at once. It alleged federal trademark infringement and counterfeiting based on three registered trademarks held by Combs.¹²

The lawsuit was handled by Vogt IP, a Chicago intellectual property firm led by Keith A. Vogt that describes itself as one of the top filers of U.S. trademark lawsuits. It was one in a series: court records showed Combs’ legal team had previously obtained per-defendant judgments of $100,000 in a case that closed in December 2022 and $250,000 in cases from August 2021 and August 2023.²

How Nicol Harness Ended Up Owing $250,000

Nicol Harness lives in Pinellas County, Florida. She has congestive heart failure and cannot hold conventional employment, so her income came from selling homemade T-shirts and tumblers through an Amazon storefront.³

After attending a Luke Combs concert in Tampa in the summer of 2023, she bought artwork online and made Combs-themed tumblers. She sold 18 of them at $20 each, grossing roughly $380.⁴

When Combs’ attorneys sued that October, the court permitted service by email. The notice arrived in an AOL account Harness rarely checked and went to her junk folder. She never saw it.² She was also hospitalized around the same time.³

Because she never responded, U.S. District Judge Elaine E. Bucklo entered a default judgment on November 15, 2023, finding Harness liable for federal trademark infringement and counterfeiting and ordering her to pay $250,000 in statutory damages. The same judgment applied to all 46 defendants.⁵²

Amazon then froze the $5,500 sitting in Harness’s storefront account for potential seizure. She only realized she had been sued when she could no longer access her funds. “It’s very stressful,” she told WFLA. “I don’t have money to pay my bills.”³

How Luke Combs Responded

WFLA consumer investigator Shannon Behnken aired the story on December 12, 2023. It went viral, drawing coverage from NBC News, ABC News, the BBC, Rolling Stone, and the Guardian.⁶⁷

Combs said he woke up at 5 a.m. the next day, saw the report, and spent two hours looking into what had happened before posting a video to Instagram.⁷⁸²

He called Harness that morning to apologize personally. He said she was “absolutely shocked,” and she later told reporters Combs was “a very nice guy, very understanding.”⁵⁶

Combs announced four steps:

He instructed his attorneys to remove Harness’s name from the lawsuit.⁶
He paid her $11,000, double the $5,500 that Amazon had frozen in her account.⁵
He launched a 14-ounce tumbler on his official merchandise site at $20, with all proceeds going to Harness and her family to help with medical bills.⁹
He offered to fly Harness and her family to a 2024 show so he could apologize in person.¹⁰

One thing that isn’t clear from the reporting: whether the $250,000 default judgment against Harness was ever formally vacated by the court. The resolution appears to have been handled through Combs’ direct financial help and his instruction to his lawyers to drop her from the case, rather than through a judicial order reversing the judgment.²

The Litigation Model That Produced the $250,000

The suit against Harness was not a one-off. It used a template known as the Schedule A Defendants Scheme, in which dozens or hundreds of online sellers are grouped into a single federal complaint. Defendants are identified only by their online business names, the complaint is filed under seal, and the plaintiff obtains a court order freezing the defendants’ funds on platforms like Amazon or eBay before most of them know they’ve been sued. These cases have been concentrated almost exclusively in the Northern District of Illinois.²¹¹

The pattern that followed was consistent. Because many defendants never saw the emailed notices, mistook them for scams, or could not afford a lawyer, default judgments followed. Federal law allows statutory damages ranging from $1,000 to $200,000 per copyright violation, with a ceiling of $2 million when infringement is deemed willful, and plaintiffs typically asked for amounts at the higher end. Even when the full judgment could not be collected, plaintiffs could still claim whatever platform funds had already been frozen. Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman estimated that Schedule A cases had by that point swept up around 600,000 merchants.²

What Has Changed Since

The Combs case became a reference point in a broader pushback. Through 2024 and 2025, several judges in the Northern District of Illinois began refusing to rubber-stamp Schedule A filings. Judge John Blakey dismissed a copyright case against 18 defendants in November 2024, ruling that the plaintiff had not shown the necessary relationship among them to justify a single lawsuit. The same month, Judge Sunil Harjani denied a request to freeze assets in a case involving 59 defendants for similar reasons.¹²

In 2025, Judge Joan B. Gottschall issued a standing order requiring attorneys filing Schedule A cases to demonstrate jurisdiction over each defendant, justify grouping them together, and show genuine efforts to identify defendants’ mailing addresses before resorting to email service.¹³ In mid-2025, Judge John Kness stayed dozens of Schedule A cases at once while reconsidering whether the routine granting of secret restraining orders, prejudgment asset freezes, and mass joinder of unrelated defendants was “unjustified under the procedural rules.” In one ruling, a court awarded nearly $100,000 in attorneys’ fees and costs to a defendant whose business affiliates had been improperly named and restrained.¹⁴

Whether those individual rulings coalesce into broader reform is still open. What is clear is that a Florida woman selling $20 tumblers pulled a quiet mass-litigation model into public view, and neither Luke Combs nor the courts have treated it the same way since.

1
Scribd. Combs v. Schedule A, 1:23-cv-14485, Complaint
2
Variety. Mass Lawsuits, Luke Combs, Tumblers: Legal Experts on Counterfeit Illinois Cottage Industry
3
WFLA. Pinellas Woman Who Sold Luke Combs-Themed Tumblers Owes Country Star $250,000, Judge Rules
4
WXII 12. Luke Combs Tumbler Copyright Lawsuit
5
NBC News. Country Star Luke Combs Apologizes to Fan Hit With $250K Copyright Fine
6
The Guardian. Luke Combs Country Singer Merchandise
7
Rolling Stone. Luke Combs Responds to Lawsuit Over Fake Merch
8
ABC News. Luke Combs Responds to Merch Lawsuit, Vows to Make It Right
9
WFLA. Luke Combs Starts Selling Tumbler to Raise Money for Pinellas Woman Ordered to Pay Him $250K
10
BBC. Luke Combs Apologises to Fan Over $250K Fine
11
Columbia Law Review. A SAD Scheme of Abusive Intellectual Property Litigation
12
NYSBA. The Need for Reform in Schedule A E-Commerce Lawsuits
13
U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois. Standing Order in Schedule A Cases
14
Potomac Law. Schedule A Under Fire