Somewhere under the railway arches between Battersea and Wandsworth Town a brewery, a bakery or a coffee roaster is printing its first labels, and nobody has checked the name. That is the commonest intellectual property mistake a Wandsworth business makes: trading for two years under a name that someone else registered first, then receiving a letter from their solicitor. A trade mark search costs little; a rebrand after the letter costs a great deal.
The borough's intellectual property is varied. The offices in the power station and around Nine Elms hold technology and media companies with software, patents and brands to protect. Tooting's restaurants and the stalls of its two markets build reputations on names and recipes that competitors imitate. Northcote Road's independent shops, the design studios and photographers of Balham and Earlsfield and the freelancers in the borough's coffee shops create copyright work daily and need contracts that say who owns it once the client has paid. The university at Roehampton adds research and the question of what a student or employee invented in their own time.
The day-to-day work is registration and paperwork: trade mark and design applications at the UK Intellectual Property Office, licences and assignments so that rights can be sold or shared, confidentiality agreements before an idea is shown to an investor, and the letter before action when a name, product or photograph has been copied. Most disputes stop there. The rest go to the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court, where capped costs and a £500,000 damages limit keep a claim within reach of a small business, and patent cases usually involve a patent attorney as well.
Registrations and standard agreements are generally fixed-fee; disputes are charged by the hour.
Firms offering intellectual property advice around Wandsworth are listed below, verified firms first. Read what intellectual property law covers, the general guide to IP solicitors, and for company matters the business law solicitors in Wandsworth page; the capital-wide view is at intellectual property solicitors in London.
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