Questions & Answers

Intellectual Property (IP) is too important not to be done properly

The value of a business can be transformed by obtaining strong IP rights. IP rights
are assets, which can be licenced and sold. Additionally, strong IP rights can be
used to stop others from using your intellectual property for free.

To ensure that your Intellectual Property assets are fully protected, you need the right partner.

We pride ourselves on delivering a high-quality IP service. If you choose us, you can
be assured of the following:

Quality

We deliver expert IP services and consultancy to a high professional standard. This
ensures robust and wide-ranging protection of your IP assets, all at a competitive
cost.

Flexibility and responsiveness

We will work pro-actively with you, working alongside you as your IP partner. We
do not hold a ‘one size fits all’ philosophy; instead we fully tailor our advice to your
unique needs.

Trust and security

We work mindfully and harmoniously with you, taking care to be sensitive to
any strategic or budgeting constraints you may have. You can be secure in the
knowledge that we are acting in your best interests at all times.

Clarity, reliability and timeliness

We aim to be approachable and available to you, communicating even complex
issues clearly, with as little jargon as possible. We will be clear about what is
happening and why. We believe you will be very pleased with both the speed and
the consistently high quality of the work that we do for you.

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All our attorneys hold qualifications awarded by the official UK and European bodies for IP attorneys and continue to meet the relevant Continuing Professional Development standards.  Our UK patent attorneys are members of CIPA; our European patent attorneys are members of the EPI; our UK TM attorneys members of CITMA, and our EU TM and/or design attorneys are registered with OHIM.  Further, our firm is regulated by the official UK regulatory body, IPREG.  Membership of these bodies automatically conveys a strict duty of confidentiality on our attorneys.  Further, all employees and relevant contractors are also bound by confidentiality requirements.

We pride ourselves on our client care standards and are one of the few firms of UK IP attorneys who carry out independent client service reviews and apply Key Account Management principles.  In the unlikely event of client dissatisfaction, we have a formal complaints procedure and offer the security of professional indemnity insurance from the industry-standard provider, PAMIA.

We have high security standards and our IT systems have state-of-the-art firewall and anti-virus protection.

We always choose the most appropriate working arrangement for each client following discussions and select the attorney(s) with the best match in terms of legal and technical experience for your needs.

For larger clients, we can offer a team of specialised attorneys, including multi-disciplinary technical/legal expertise teams if required.

We constantly review our client relationships to ensure that our high level of service is maintained.

The firm started life in Cheltenham in 1964 as the one man-practice of John Wynne-Jones, who previously worked as a patent attorney at other IP firms in the UK as well as in Chicago, USA. Early success led to him taking over the practice of a retiring patent attorney in Cardiff, establishing our first office in that city.

Over the next few years, business grew sufficiently for John to take on other attorneys, two of whom, Simon Lainé and Michael James, went on to become partners and the firm became known as Wynne-Jones, Lainé & James in the mid-1970s.  There followed a period of steady growth and John Wynne-Jones eventually retired in 1989, leaving behind a thriving firm with a very sound base of clients and personnel.

Thereafter, the firm continued to progress and modernise, converting from a traditional UK partnership structure to a Limited Liability Practice in 2008.  We are still growing and in 2012 re-branded the firm as Wynne-Jones IP.

We charge based on a combination of competitive hourly rates and fixed service charges for certain operations, such as filing a patent or registered trade mark application.

Clear, up-front estimates can be provided on request and we always work to give you the best value from your IP budget.

Some of our service charges are discounted for start-up companies and individuals.

No.  We’re a regulated firm of IP attorneys and our membership of official bodies means that we are automatically bound by strict client-adviser confidentiality rules.

Further, several of our patent attorneys are amongst the small number of UK IP practitioner's who are capable of handling work under Section 22 (Information prejudicial to the safety of the realm or safety of the public) of the UK Patents Act.

Please also see our answer regarding professional credentials.

If you want to protect your creation then it’s a good idea to first check if it’s new because this will affect the type, and scope, of IP protection available.

We offer professional searches for this purpose, but it can be useful to do some initial searching of your own, including general WWW searching using Google or other search engine, looking at the catalogues of manufacturers of similar items and so on. Another suggestion is to search patent documents, which describe ideas that may not be available elsewhere. The Espacenet database offers free keyword-based searching of international patent documents:

http://worldwide.espacenet.com/singleLineSearch?locale=en_EP

If you don’t find anything identical then we’d suggest you keep a record of the closest existing idea/product you find because this will be a good starting point for our discussion regarding how best to protect your creation.

There’s also the question of whether you’d be at risk of infringing others’ existing IP rights by commercialising your idea/product. This is an even more complex issue and we’d strongly recommend that you get professional assistance. However, it will be useful if you can gather some preliminary information, such as details of the main potential competitors, any similar products with “patented” or “patent pending” warnings on them of which you’re aware, and so on.

Our general advice is to check to see if someone else already has the same, or similar, name already registered as a trade mark. If they do then you could be at risk of infringing their rights and may need to re-think.

A good starting point for this type of search is the UK IP Office’s registered trade mark database:

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/tm/t-os/t-find/tmtext.htm

However, it’s important to note that whilst this database does provide some “wildcard” searching, it should be used as an initial investigation only to identify potential risks; for instance, it doesn’t offer full searching of phonetically-similar marks, which our professional clearance searches do.

Further, even if you do find an existing trade mark that appears, on the face of it, to be problematic then we’d always recommend that you obtain a qualified trade mark attorney’s opinion because there are many factors that determine the actual coverage of trade mark rights – it might not be as bad as it first looks!

Intellectual Property law is undoubtedly a complex subject and even us specialist attorneys find it a constant learning process!

Whilst much useful background information on IP is available online such as the UK IP Office’s basic IP guide, it’s no surprise that we, as well as independent bodies, such as the IP Office, strongly recommend that you consult a qualified attorney in order to gain a full understanding and get advice that is relevant to your needs. We’re happy to offer free initial consultations with no time restrictions (at our discretion) so that we can fully discuss how we can help you and answer your questions.