Intellectual Property

Every business has intangible assets that are valuable and include brands, designs, know-how, technology, data, confidential information and goodwill.

Intellectual Property Protection

Protecting your brands, design rights, know how, and technology is important to ensure that the value of your IP assets is clearly understood and maintained within your business.

We offer clients a competitively priced “one stop shop” for international trade marks, registered designs and domain names. On your behalf, we will undertake the full range of clearance, registration, conflict resolution, enforcement and portfolio management services worldwide. Through our network of international agents, we are able to provide such portfolio management services at competitive rates.

We also advise on the protection of intangible assets that are unregistered including software, data, and confidential information.

Intellectual Property Litigation

Where you believe that you intellectual property rights have been infringed we can enforce your rights on your behalf through the courts in this country and overseas.

Our track record in this area is very strong, handling cases of:

• trade mark or copyright infringement.
• passing off – our anti-counterfeiting experience spans the full range of available measures including investigations, liaison with Customs and local trading standards officers and proceedings for infringement. We have extensive experience of anti-counterfeiting procedures in Asia.
• patent litigation - we are experienced in multi-jurisdictional patent litigation strategy. This includes obtaining interim injunctions to patent disputes.

Intellectual Property Exploitation

More and more businesses are recognising the value of converting your IP from a cost into an asset that generates income for your business.

You can achieve this in a number of ways, through licensing or distribution agreements to take innovative products to market.

We have extensive experience in technology transfer agreements, international licensing and collaboration arrangements in relation to a diverse range of industries from consumer goods to biotechnology and electronics to renewable technologies. We have represented clients in cross-border technology licensing arrangements including those in India and New Zealand.

In practice, we will:

• Identify the IP right you wish to exploit
• Identify the appropriate exploitation method eg licensing, co-branding, brand extensions, joint R & D, joint ventures etc.
• Draft and negotiate the relevant agreements for you

At a minimum, valuation of your IP is necessary to ensure regulatory compliance and corporate governance. However, correct valuation of your IP has many ramifications for the business as a whole. This can include:

• Allocating resources for marketing
• Determining pricing strategies
• Communicating with stakeholders like investors, employees and customers
• Obtaining appropriate insurance cover

At this point, your IP has value on paper only. However there are a number of ways in which you can convert it into cash, the process by which this value can be extracted.

• Via private funding (from venture capital, private equity, banks)
• Via public funding (on AIM, Nasdaq etc)
• Through the sale of the assets (eg licensing or assignment) or sale of the business or company
• Securitisation of the IP assets through bonds and other forms of securities.

By converting this value, you are effectively extracting the value in your IP assets and realising the value you have built into it.

See our Expertise in Practice.