Trade marks and brands can be highly valuable assets and key to customer recognition, reputation and sales. We will guide you through the processes required to use a new brand or trade mark and help you manage, protect, enforce and commercially leverage your portfolio of brands and trade marks, whether by licences, sales, franchising or other strategic alliances or partnerships; purchase of trade marks and brands that fit your portfolio; or dealing with any challenges to your use of any trade marks or brands.

We will also help you with domain names and social media branding.

Key to the competitive advantage of many businesses is know how or trade secrets. Adequately recording and protecting this type of information is essential in order to be able to take action if it is ever subject to unauthorised use or disclosure. We will assist you with your strategy to manage know how and advise you when it comes to disclosing it, both internally and externally, by providing you with confidentiality agreements/NDAs.

Patenting can be a complex and expensive area to navigate, including deciding whether to patent new technology, where to protect it and how to commercialise it. We have extensive experience in advising on patent protection, use, licensing and exploitation. Navigating around other people’s patents can also be challenging and can lead to unexpected costs and risks and we will advise on how to avoid infringement.

From day to day software required to operate your business to development projects and outsourcing we will assist with technology related agreements. Our expertise includes licensing, joint ventures, reseller arrangements, software as a service, e-commerce, software development, hosting and procurement.

For many businesses, whether at the point of seeking investment, or at the time of a merger or acquisition, or in anticipation of any of these, a key part of the underlying value is in IP. With our vast experience in IP, IT, commercial and data protection matters, we will provide advice, assistance and clear and concise guidance, including undertaking due diligence checks to protect that value and to ensure that there are no surprises when it comes to a corporate transaction.

We will help you to identify, manage, track and protect your IP so that you will build up value in your business from the outset. We will assist with preparing founder IP transfers to secure all IP within the business, and help you to develop your IP and confidentiality protection strategy, as well as advising on employee IP, consultant IP and licences or assignments from third parties.