Intellectual Property

As specialists in intellectual property, Ffrench Legal regularly advises on intellectual property issues in areas including copyright, designs, trade marks and patent law.

The first step is understanding your intellectual property, the next is to ensure that it is protected. Many businesses fail to recognise the value of their intellectual property.

Our intellectual property services include:

• identification, protection and commercialisation of intellectual property
• enforcement of intellectual property rights, including trade mark, patent and copyright infringements
• franchising
• licensing and distribution
• joint ventures/strategic alliances
• trade mark registration in Australia and internationally
• trade mark portfolio management
• designs advice
• patents advice
• competition law
• confidential information
• audits of intellectual property assets

Brand Protection
Why do you need to protect your brand?

Prudent business owners take their brand protection a step further than the mandatory business name registration and understand that only a trade mark provides you with the exclusive rights to exploit your brand within Australia. Trade mark registration is an Australian wide protection.

Failing to protect your brand adequately could mean loss of profits and potentially an expensive process of recovery.

Ffrench Legal has the expertise to assist you in obtaining trade marks for your business. We provide a holistic approach taking into account not only your trade mark needs but also your brand from a marketing, business and legal prospective.

Brand Infringement
What would your business be without its brand? Consider the following:

• Is your business recognised by your brand?
• Has a competitor used your business name?
• Have you experienced customer confusion between your business & another?
• Is your business name the same as another’s domain name ?

Infringement can be deliberate and blatant or innocent and coincidental. Either way it is damaging. You need to protect and enforce your brand.

Idea Commercialisation
It is one thing to obtain protection for your intellectual property but another to make money from it. Ffrench Legal has extensive experience and planning services to assist you.

We can assist you to:

1. develop a new brand to fit with your existing ones;
2. take a new product to some “key” industry players;
3. create a strategy to benefit from an invention you have created; or
4. acquire business and form alliances.

Ffrench Legal will provide you with the guidance and assistance throughout the commercialisation process.

Copyright
If you have written a book, written a song, painted a picture or have taken a photo you may have copyright in those things. Ffrench Legal specialises in identifying copyright issues and we are able to provide you with sound advice on how to protect any copyright you may have and how to avoid infringing the copyright of others.

Not owning your copyright can be an expensive lesson. We can assist you with assignment and managing of your rights.

Patents and Design
We work closely with specialist patent and design attorneys when needed.

We assist clients to commercialise their patents and designs as well as protect and enforce their rights when needed.

Our team
The Ffrench Legal intellectual property team is made up of:

Rob Ffrench
Rebecca Brookes
Richard Bradfield