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Intellectual property

Creating intellectual property strategies that protect and defend

Intellectual property (IP) owners operate in an increasingly global and digital environment. Our lawyers know what it takes to protect great ideas or research breakthroughs. They have the best strategies to commercialise your IP and effectively enforce your IP rights worldwide.

Along with considerable expertise designing and executing IP commercialisation; our team has a busy copyright, trade marks and patent practice. We help clients fend off attempts to copy their inventions and we're skilled at implementing effective anti-piracy and border protection campaigns. We’re also experienced in frontier litigation concerning online copyright infringement for local and international companies; particularly film, TV and music industry clients – and for this reason we won Managing IP’s Contentious Firm of the Year award in 2019. 

Our IP team is the most experienced of all New Zealand’s full service law firms, working for significant investors and IP owners across our economy:

  • developing and implementing brand protection strategies
  • trade mark applications and litigation
  • copyright infringement, including targeting internet piracy
  • using and commercialising IP through the sale of IP rights, IP sharing and joint ownership arrangements, and trade mark licensing negotiations
  • patent litigation.
  • Acting on the IP aspects of a number of domestic and international merger and acquisition transactions and investments including:
    • Fonterra in selling its Tip Top ice cream business to Froneri, including negotiating the long term brand licence agreement for the shared Kāpiti brand
    • Hg Capital in its acquisition of the Rhapsody business from Orion Health and subsequent investment back into Orion Health, including advising on the brand sale and licensing issues, and on-going software distribution arrangements
    • Hellaby Holdings’ $73m acquisition of an 85% stake in Contract Resources, a New Zealand-founded oil and gas services company.
  • Advising Microsoft on its anti-piracy and copyright enforcement programme in New Zealand.
  • Representing Fisher & Paykel Healthcare on its New Zealand defence to international patent litigation brought by ResMed.
  • Advising New Zealand Trade and Enterprise on how to establish its Foodbasket e-commerce venture including establishing IP protection for the collective’s brand.
  • Assisting Fonterra to develop its IP protection and licensing strategy for milk vat telemetry technology to meet regulatory demand for granular real time milk composition data.
  • Acting as senior counsel for the Motion Picture Association of America in a range of copyright infringement and asset freezing matters in New Zealand.
  • Representing Sky on ground-breaking, site-blocking litigation.
  • Preparing submissions on the review of the Copyright Act for various groups of rights holders.
Ranked Tier One for intellectual property work.Chambers Asia Pacific 2024 | Legal 500 Asia Pacific 2024