NIPC Law

We have an adversarial system of civil litigation in England and Wales as do most other English speaking countries. In an adversarial system the parties choose the issues over which they wish to fight and produce the evidence that they want the tribunal to consider. By contrast, most of the rest of the world has an inquisitorial system where the tribunal leads an inquiry into the facts. Each system has its advantages and it is beyond the scope of this article to decide which is superior but one advantage of the inquisitorial system is that it is very much cheaper. In the New Patent County Court Rules , Why IP Yorkshire and many other articles as well as in my book Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights I referred to the IPAC report The Enforcement of Patent Rights that compared the costs of patent infringement litigation in France, Germany and the Netherlands in 2003 (between 10,000 and 50,000 euro) with the costs in England and Wales (£150,000 to £250,000 in the Patents County ...

This article was written by my sister in law and tenant, Lois Cole-Wilson , and was first published on the IP/IT Update website on w8 May 2008 under the title  Legal Aid, Human Rights, Libel and McDonald: Steel and Morris v UK.   Lois had some insight into this case because she was the pupil to one of the counsel in the orginal hearing.   For further information please contact Lois through our Contact page. The European Court of Human Rights ( "ECHR" ) has handed down judgment in the case between the Greenpeace campaigners Helen Steel and David Morris and the United Kingdom ( The case of Steel and Morris v UK   (Application no. 68416/0 1 . (2005) 41 EHRR 22, [2005] ECHR 103).   This was the conclusion to a case which has the accolade of being the longest running case in English legal history. It has lasted nine years and six months, with a trial lasting two years and six months and an appeal lasting twenty three days. The Libel Case The litigants often referred to as the McL...