Accused of Infringing the Trademark of Another Business

[LucidIllusion]

My family owns a tree service in Georgia titled Treemaster, Inc. Our website is mytreeservice.net. We just received this cease and desist letter from a lawyer representing a company called "Marietta Tree Service": http://imgur.com/8nZr5pG

I personally don't believe that this is anything more than a scare tactic. However, I'd like to get everyone's opinion on the matter. Here are the points I'd like to discuss:

1. Should we respond or ignore this letter?
2. They are claiming their trademark is "Marietta Tree Service" (one of the cities in which we operate) is part of their trademarked name. You will find references on our site contain the phrase "Marietta tree service" in a descriptive matter. Only Marietta is capitalized, the other words are not. I would have to assume this is not copyright infringement, correct?
3. The letter gives no direct examples of infringement, just general language. Is this evidence that they have no real legal foothold?
4. Would this be considered frivolous, abuse, or some other legal term? Could we complain about the trademark? What about the lawyer's practices?
5. If we continue to use the phrase "Marietta tree service", what is the likelihood a lawsuit would take place? I imagine we would win easily, but at what cost range?

Thank you for your help. The phrase is very powerful SEO for our website, and we don't want to just roll over and give it up. I'm sure this lawyer and his client know the power behind it, which is why they are trying to scare everyone off of it.

[flyingron]

Marietta Tree Service, is a pretty descriptive, i.e., weak and barely enforceable mark. Further, using "your Marietta tree service" as you have it in the bolded type in the middle of the page wouldn't seem to infringe on their mark even if it were strong. However, if you want you can just eliminate the consecutive words that sound like their corporate name with something like "your tree service in Marietta."

Joe Koch, owner of Sam Adams (Boston Beer Company) had little success trying to keep people from using the words Boston and Beer in their product names.

It's easy to send threatening letters.
It's a little more expensive to sue in court.
In my opinion, it's going to be near impossible to prevail on this one.

By the way, your site is not enhanced at all by sound, especially not the jim-bob-boy amateur voice over.