Walk from Tate Modern along Southwark Street and you pass the offices of design studios, architects, publishers and advertising agencies whose entire value lies in work that can be copied with a right-click. Three miles south, the studios of Copeland Park and the Bussey Building in Peckham house illustrators, fashion labels, musicians and games developers in the same position with smaller budgets. Intellectual property solicitors in Southwark serve both ends of that spectrum, and the questions are much the same: who owns the work, how is it protected, and what happens when somebody takes it.
Ownership is the first problem. Copyright in a design, a photograph or a piece of code belongs to whoever created it unless a contract says otherwise, so an agency that uses freelancers, or a start-up whose founder wrote the software before the company existed, may not own what it is selling. A solicitor fixes that with assignments and properly drafted contracts. Trade marks come next: a name or logo registered at the UK Intellectual Property Office is far easier to defend than an unregistered one, and graduates of the London College of Communication at Elephant and Castle are told so repeatedly but still learn it the hard way.
Enforcement usually starts and ends with a letter. Where it does not, the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court, which caps recoverable costs and limits damages to £500,000, is built for the size of dispute a Peckham label or a Bankside studio can afford to bring. For patents, firms work alongside a patent attorney. Licensing, from a typeface to a television format, is the quieter but larger part of the work.
Registrations and standard agreements are usually fixed-fee; disputes are charged by the hour.
The intellectual property firms near Southwark are listed below, verified first. Read what intellectual property law covers, the general IP solicitors guide, and, for company matters, business law solicitors in Southwark.
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