You may want to explore filing a UDRP complaint with ICANN. You don't need a lawyer necessarily. However, it does cost ~$1300 to file a complaint for 1 domain for a 1 person dispute panel (you can get up to 5 people on a panel.) End-to-end timeline from when you submit the complaint to when you get a judgment is about 30 days (can be up to 60, though.)
As already pointed out here, you do need a strong case and a existing trademark. In our case, we were looking to obtain rights to top-level .COM domain that was an acronym of our current site's fullname URL--the acronym was favorable for obvious reasons and we/our users had used the acronym extensively to reference our site.
You basically have to prove all three of these things:
(i) The domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights; and
(ii) The owner(s) have no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name; and
(iii) The domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith. (source: ICANN)
If you haven't gotten a response from the owner based on the WHOIS info, you can file a different type of ICANN complaint (free to file this one) that should force the registrar to contact the owner, who will update the WHOIS information. We had gone through this while trying to buy the domain from the squatter and not getting a response. We think he just updated WHOIS info with fictitious contact information again.
As already pointed out here, you do need a strong case and a existing trademark. In our case, we were looking to obtain rights to top-level .COM domain that was an acronym of our current site's fullname URL--the acronym was favorable for obvious reasons and we/our users had used the acronym extensively to reference our site.
You basically have to prove all three of these things:
(i) The domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights; and
(ii) The owner(s) have no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name; and
(iii) The domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith. (source: ICANN)
If you haven't gotten a response from the owner based on the WHOIS info, you can file a different type of ICANN complaint (free to file this one) that should force the registrar to contact the owner, who will update the WHOIS information. We had gone through this while trying to buy the domain from the squatter and not getting a response. We think he just updated WHOIS info with fictitious contact information again.