On the perimeter of Biggin Hill Airport, hangars that once held Spitfires now hold aircraft maintenance companies, charter operators and engineering firms whose value lies in approvals, software, designs and trade secrets as much as in tools. A few miles north, the industrial estates of the Cray Valley make and distribute products that are copied as soon as they sell, and across the borough thousands of consultants, designers, online retailers and small manufacturers trade from home offices in Beckenham, Orpington and West Wickham. Intellectual property solicitors in Bromley serve all of them, and the work is more varied than the borough's suburban image suggests.
The most common jobs are unglamorous and valuable: registering a trade mark at the UK Intellectual Property Office for a business name used for twenty years and never protected; drafting confidentiality agreements before an engineering firm shares drawings with a contractor; sorting out who owns the website, the photographs and the software a freelancer built for a company; licensing a product design to a manufacturer; and writing the letter that stops a competitor using a copied name or product. Patent applications for the aviation and engineering sector are handled with a patent attorney, the solicitor dealing with the contracts and any dispute.
Most infringements end with that letter and a negotiated settlement. Those that do not are suited to the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court, which caps the costs a loser must pay and limits damages to £500,000, keeping litigation affordable for a Bromley business that could not contemplate the High Court.
A registration or a standard agreement is usually a fixed price; litigation runs on an hourly rate.
The intellectual property firms below serve Bromley, verified ones first. Background reading: the explainer on what intellectual property law covers and the general IP solicitors page; company questions go to business law solicitors in Bromley, and the capital's specialist firms are on the London IP page.
Verified