Intellectual Property and Technology

We advise across the full spectrum of intellectual property — copyright, patents, trade marks, designs, and proprietary and confidential information — with emphasis on the commercial architecture surrounding those rights rather than on filing alone. We advise on how rights are created, recorded, held, licensed, enforced and monetised, and we conduct the diligence that establishes whether a client in fact owns what it has assumed it owns. Chain of title, employee and contractor assignments, and the integrity of confidentiality regimes are examined as a matter of course, because these are the three places where ownership is most often found to be defective and always at the least convenient moment.

Representative work: 

• Copyright strategy, ownership analysis and chain-of-title opinions 
• trade mark clearance, prosecution, oppositions, rectification and enforcement 
• patent commercialisation, assignment and licensing · trade secret, know-how and confidential information regimes 
• IP audits and portfolio management 
• IP holding structures, royalty flows and revenue-share arrangements 
• brand licensing, merchandising and franchising 
• anti-counterfeiting, anti-piracy and online takedown programmes 
• design and trade dress protection 
• intellectual property diligence on investments, acquisitions and financings