NIPC Law

The Rolls Building Author Judicial Office Licence CC BY-SA 4. 0   Source Wikimedia Commons Jane Lambert Last week I chaired 4 of the 5 daily sessions of Informa's Cambridge IP "Winter School"  and delivered 3 of the talks. The title of the last of those talks (which was also the last talk of the Winter School) was IP Litigation in England and Wale s. I offered that talk because not all the attendees in previous years' summer schools had been legally qualified and many of those who were so qualified were new to IP.  It seemed to me that there was not much point in discussing the complexities of IP litigation without a grounding in the basics. IP litigation differs from other types of civil litigation in many ways.  It has its own rules and practice direction.  Much IP business is conducted in specialist courts and all of the rest are in a specialist list in the Chancery Division.  IP litigation can be particularly expensive which is why threats to br...

NielsF / CC BY-SA (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) Jane Lambert Queen's Bench Division  (Mr Justice Griffiths)  DSN v Blackpool Football Club Ltd   [2020] EWHC 670 (QB) (20 March 2020) Paragraph 8  of the  Practice Direction - Pre-Action Conduct and Protocols  which I discussed in  Practice Direction - Pre-Action Conduct and Protocols Update   on 12 Oct 2019 advises: "Litigation should be a last resort. As part of a relevant pre-action protocol or this Practice Direction, the parties should consider whether negotiation or some other form of ADR might enable them to settle their dispute without commencing proceedings." Paragraph 9 adds that  p arties should continue to consider the possibility of reaching a settlement at all times, including after proceedings have been started.  Paragraph 10 lists the types of ADR that are available to litigants such as mediation, arbitration, early neutral evalu...

Manchester Civil Justice Centre Author Skip88  Reproduced with kind permission of the author Wikipedia   Jane Lambert The Practice Direction - Pre-Action Conduct and Protocol s has been updated with effect from 9 Oct 2019.  It was last updated on 29 April 2015 and I wrote about the changes in What to do about the new Practice Direction - Pre-Action Conduct on 6 May 2015.   I explained the importance of the Practice Direction in Pre-Action Correspondence - Not Just a Box to be ticked or a Hoop to be jumped through   2 Aug 2017. The updated Practice Direction contains the following paragraphs: Title Number Introduction Para. 1 Objectives of pre-action conduct and protocols Para. 3 Proportionality Para. 4 Steps before issuing a claim at court Para. 6 Experts Para. 7 Settlement and ADR Para. 8 Stocktake and list of issues Para. 12 Compliance with this practice direction and the protocols Para. 13 Limitation Para. 17 Prot...

Leeds Law Courts (c) 2005 Jane Lambert: all rights reserved Jane Lambert Until the Civil Procedure Rules ( "CPR" ) came into force in 1999 solicitors specializing in intellectual property law heralded litigation with an ultimatum called a letter before action . Written in haughty if not insulting terms and accompanied by a humiliating form of undertakings, they were intended to shock the recipient into submission. They rarely achieved the desired result. As often as not they were simply ignored.  Occasionally, they were answered by a defiant response.  As a result, a lot of actions were launched that could easily have been settled without recourse to litigation. As I wrote in Dispute Resolution   all that was supposed to change with the introduction of Pre-Action Protocols and the Practice Direction-Pre-Action Conduct and Protocols : "The objective of the Practice Direction and the Pre-Action Protocols is to enable the parties to identify the ...

Jane Lambert The European IPR Helpdesk , an EU-funded collaboration between Infeurope SA , Eurice GmbH  and  L'Institut de la Propriété Intellectuelle Luxembourg  to provide free, first-line advice and information on intellectual property, has recently published two fact sheets on IP and trade fairs. The first, which is entitled  Intellectual property management at trade fairs ,  is addressed to exhibitors at, and visitors to, trade fairs while the second,  IP considerations for trade fair organisers , is addressed to organizers. Both fact sheets were developed in co-operation with the European Major Exhibition Centres Associaton  and the European Exhibition Industry Alliance, Intellectual property management at trade fairs starts with "Things you should know before participating in a trade fair." These include "Knowing the IPRs you own", "Registration is the easiest and most effective way to fight against infring...

WIPO Head Office, Geneva  Author Emmanuel Berrod Licence  CC BY-SA 4.0   Source Flickr Jane Lambert This is the first of a series of articles on domain name disputes. Schemes for the rapid resolution of domain name disputes such as ICANN's  UDRP (Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy ), Nominet's Dispute Resolution Service ( "DRS" ) and the Czech Court of Arbitration's ".euADR"  are probably the most successful use of alternative dispute resolution ( "ADR" ) on the planet and the topic is important for that reason alone. It is also important because such schemes are probably indispensable for the rapid development of the Internet.  It is inconceivable that businesses would have invested anything that the that they have on the development of on-line platforms for the delivery of many sorts of services without a quick and cheap method of domain name dispute resolution. My Qualifications and Experience I have been int...