Practice Areas

The core practice of intellectual property law relates to the creation and enforcement of patents, trademarks, and copyright. Each of these rights depends upon the creative development of an intangible property. Most countries in the world have recognized that limited monopoly rights are available in return for the work, effort, and dissemination involved in creating the intellectual property (IP). However, by design, there are numerous requirements that must be complied within order to create these rights. Failure to follow the scheme may result in denial of the right. While there is significant harmonization of the requirements to obtain these rights in more than one country under many international treaties, many countries have unique rules or interpretations on the general treaty requirements. Further, each of these rights is only a chose inaction, namely these rights can only be used to prevent others from using or infringing the exclusive rights. This essentially means that enforcement of these rights is critical to their value.

Intellectual property law, however, has expanded in many ways to extend into ancillary and related areas such as licensing; mergers and acquisitions; related regulatory issues; advertising and marketing issues; packaging and labels; as well as new media and copyright. Enforcement and creation of intellectual property rights is also integral to the life-cycle management strategy for the development of a new product as well as the development and protection of the market for that product.

Further, a given product may involve more than one IP issue. For instance, a new product may involve a new technology, which may give rise to a patent; it may be sold under a trademark and may involve other related issues.

While each of these areas has a similar structure in the sense of first requiring a creation of right, and then enforcement, each of the sub-areas has their own unique characteristics and requirements. Consequently, there are many types of intellectual property lawyers.

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