Intellectual property is critical to the competitive advantage of most businesses in Australia’s knowledge and service based economy. It is often ignored, misunderstood or underused. The value of IP is often only appreciated when it is infringed by rivals or stolen by employees.
Businesses must act early to protect and enforce IP rights, or they risk losing ground to competitors.
Strategic protection
Gadens’ experienced IP lawyers assist rights owners and users to develop, protect and manage their intangible assets, including inventions, brands, business secrets, copyrights, software, franchises, contracts, licences and reputations.
We work with business owners, patent attorneys, accountants and other client advisers to provide an integrated IP service for traditional and emerging industries, and innovators.
Management, commercialisation and enforcement
Our lawyers advise clients through all stages of the commercialisation and economic cycle. We assist innovators and start-ups with IP audits, forward-thinking agreements and protective filings. We also review the strengths and weaknesses in due diligence for acquisitions and investment and help clients protect their business secrets against the risk of theft by employees.
We identify IP of value in insolvencies and when crises arise, provide strategic advice on injunctions, brand and reputation protection, competitors’ actions, departure of key employees, loss of data and other unexpected events.
Experience
Representation in urgent disputes, including injunctions and search and freezing orders in various cases including copyright, patent, confidential information, restraint of trade and technology transfer
Advising and representation in contentious social media, database and software cases, including copyright, patent, domain name, defamation aspects
Advising and representation in patent infringement and revocation matters
Copyright law advice to a large registered training organisation including advice on the scope of its statutory copyright licence
Advice about trade mark, copyright moral rights and parallel importing issues arising out of infrastructure and property development, insolvencies, collaboration projects, online and traditional advertising, product marketing and packaging
Advising on university student copyright ownership issues
Advising on licensing of rights to intellectual property including national brand and domain name protection, licence drafting and structuring advice
Advising on infringement of the copyright subsisting in photographs of products used on websites by Australian traders, and the use of take down notices in Australia
Acting for a publicly listed company in its international negotiations for the acquisition of a drug patent portfolio from a European pharmaceutical company, and the drafting of an agreement for the manufacture of that drug in accordance with cGMP
Advising regarding the use of IP holding companies in operating structures.