NIPC Law

 On 18 Sept 2008 I wrote in IP Yorkshire : "Team GB may have done very well at the Beijing Olympics but our inventors and entrepreneurs are nothing like as successful in the European patent application stakes. As can be seen from the ..... table [in the article], we trail a poor 7th in the number of European patent applications. Not only do we lag behind the economic super-powers, the USA and Japan, but we compare badly even to France and Germany with similar populations and GDP. We even trail the Netherlands and Switzerland with a third and an eighth of our population respectively and are about to be overtaken by distant South Korea which was a battlefield 50 years ago."  I considered why the UK does so badly and found that it was because "start-ups and other small businesses, that are the mainspring of innovation in the UK as in most of our competitors, make much less use of the intellectual property system than their equivalents in other countries and, indeed, mu...

I have just seen an interesting post about Professional Bodies by Barbara Cookson on the IP Solo Practitioners' blog which deserves as much publicity as it can get. The legal services industry is in for major changes once Part V of the Legal Services Act 2007 comes into force.  Although most of my colleagues have yet to see it, specialist IP counsel have far more in common with excellent one person or small firms of patent agents like Filemot or indeed law firms like Pemberton Reid  and James Love Legal  or indeed Toni Tease in America than we do with the factory sets in Manchester or Liverpool or indeed  they do with the mega law firms and rapidly expanding patent agents firms. That's why I set up IP Yorkshire   which Barbara understood and kin dly blogged in  A n Alternative Business Model based on Quality .

You may be interested in a glossary of IP terms and expressions that I have published on my IP Yorkshire blog . That blog, in case, you have not seen it, is primarily for my local public access and non-specialist solicitor clients who are more interested in inventors' club meetings and Business Link Yorkshire vouchers than in high failuting matters like the the doctrine of equivalents or litigaiton between pharmas and mobiel phone makers.