NLP History 5 - splintered

In 1980 Bandler's collaboration with Grinder abruptly ended and also Leslie Cameron-Bandler filed for divorce. Bandler, Grinder and their group of associates parted ways. A number of agreements were reached as to legal settlement between Bandler and Grinder, as regarded NLP and their partnership. Shortly after (1983), Bandler's company Not Ltd declared bankruptcy. Matters were not helped by Bandler being charged with the 1986 murder of Corine Christensen, who like Bandler at the time was a cocaine user. (He was acquitted,[6] and the case remains officially unsolved.)

Ongoing legal threats ensued throughout the 1980s and 1990s surrounding trademarks, intellectual property and copyright, causing some of Bandler and Grinder's books to go out of print for a while ('Structure I & II', and 'Patterns I & II' – considered the foundations of the field – were later republished).

In July 1996 after many years of legal controversy, Bandler filed a lawsuit against Grinder and again in January 1997 against both Grinder and numerous prominent members of the NLP community including, Carmen Bostic-St. Clair, Steve Andreas and Connirae Andreas. In his suit, Bandler claimed (retrospective) sole ownership of NLP, and the sole right to use the term under trademark, as well as trademark infringement, conspiratorial tortious interference and breach of settlement agreement and permanent injunction by Grinder. In addition, Bandler claimed "damages against each such defendant in an amount to be proven at trial, but in no event less than US$10,000,000.00" per individual. The list of defendants included 200 "Does", i.e. empty names to be specified later.

On February 2000 the US Superior Court found against Bandler stating that "Bandler has misrepresented to the public, through his licensing agreement and promotional materials, that he is the exclusive owner of all intellectual property rights associated with NLP, and maintains the exclusive authority to determine membership in and certification in the Society of NLP."

Contemporaneous with Bandler's suits in the US Superior Court, Tony Clarkson (a UK practitioner) asked the UK High Court to revoke Bandler's UK registered trademark "NLP", in order to clarify legally whether this was a generic term rather than intellectual property. The UK High Court found in favor of Clarkson, and that NLP was a generic term, later declaring Bandler bankrupt in the UK for failure to pay the sum of the ruling.


Based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_neuro-linguistic_programming
licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0