Scots firms score in international IP awards

Two Scottish solicitor firms have won awards at the 2019 Managing IP Awards, the 15th annual celebration of excellence in global IP practice.

Brodies’ IP team picked up the awards for Scotland’s Trade Mark Contentious Firm of the Year and IP Transactions and Advisory Firm of the Year, while Burness Paull was named winners of the Scottish Patent Contentious Firm of the Year and also Scottish Copyright Firm of the Year.

The awards were presented at the Managing Intellectual Property European, Middle Eastern and Africa (EMEA) Awards ceremony at London’s Royal Lancaster Hotel last night.

Robert Buchan, partner and head of Brodies’ contentious IP team, said: “Over the past 12 months we have been fortunate enough to work with clients across the UK and internationally to address a wide range of interesting and challenging IP protection, commercialisation and enforcement matters. IP continues to be critical in safeguarding the future of many businesses, encouraging innovation and improving the bottom line. This year we have worked on international patent and trade mark disputes and high value IP transactions, as well as using the local Scottish courts to successfully protect valuable IP rights.

“Receiving these awards from Managing IP for the seventh consecutive year is a great honour, and is testament to the hard work of the team at Brodies, not to mention our clients, who we thank for continuing to trust us with challenging and interesting mandates.”

Colin Hulme of Burness Paull commented: “We are totally focused on providing clients with a market-leading service, and having first received an award at this event in 2018 it’s fantastic that we’ve been able to build on that success and collect two this year.

“The Patents award is reflective of the ongoing work we are doing with AstraZeneca in the Court of Session and acting for both operators and major service companies on patent disputes in Scotland and internationally in the oil and gas sector. The breadth of our practice is underlined by the Copyright award in recognition of our work for significant rights-holder clients such as the Harris Tweed Authority, Sky, PPL, PRS for Music, and the enforcement of their rights across Scotland ensures we are the heaviest user of the Scottish IP Court by some margin.”