Trade Mark Bully - Claim Form shock - IP Pro Bono Scheme

Well maybe only as far as IPEC

It's a well-known myth that legal advice is unaffordable.

It's also  generally assumed that lawyers won't help you for free in any commercial matter.

This is now wrong with the launch of a new service today 17 October 2016 to provide free assistance to those who can't afford it in the UK intellectual property scene.

This post is not for the intellectual property professionals, it's for those people who need help but believe they can't afford it and are tempted to do nothing when they receive aggressive letters from lawyers about some issue of a name, unauthorised use of a photograph or design or, worse still, something that mentions the evil patent word.

The IP pro bono scheme was launched today by Sean Dennehey, Acting

Sean Dennehey

Chief Executive of the Intellectual Property Office. The service will not be provided by the IPO, who grant trademarks designs and patents and also provide mediation services and also operate a rather sterling phone helpline. The service providers will be fully qualified members of the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys, (who are providing the administration - good guys) the Chartered Institute of Trademark Attorneys or the Intellectual Property Lawyers Association

If you need help the first thing is to go to the new website http://www.ipprobono.org.uk/  download an application form and outline your problem. If you don't have access to a computer or scanning facitlites get to one of the PATLIB libraries for help.

It's never a great thing to be litigant in person, if you can get some professional assistance. For matters relating to intellectual property, particularly claims that are made in the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court any one of the above organisations can help you find paid advice. This scheme is for those who find themselves threatened or abused but don't have the resources to cope.


While the Daily Mail and others have highlighted the problems of County Court Judgements for debt, a default judgement in a trademark infringement matter can also result in a charging order on your house that means you can't sell it or other similar civil remedies. There are people in this position because they couldn't or did't get help. The purpose of this scheme is so that it doesn't happen again. Even when you find you are in the wrong, there are ways to minimise the pain and most IP owners would prefer those solutions rather than silence.

Mediation, IP practice and the good of one's soul

If only ...!

When an actor is out of work, he is never said to be unemployed: the polite euphemism is that he is "resting". Euphemisms for "unemployed" extend far beyond the sphere of thespianism, though. Thus a footballer who is no longer selected to play for his team is "regaining match fitness"; a politician who is voted out of Parliament is "considering his options"; IT consultants are "between projects", and so on.

Recent conversations with intellectual property practitioners -- both those who are unemployed and those who are underemployed -- have caused me to wonder whether we too have a euphemism for this condition. It's called "doing some mediation".

It's true that there are some fortunate souls who excel in this area, bringing not only satisfaction to those who engage them but creating and sustaining an income stream that, if not constant, is at least relatively stable and predictable. Many others, it seems, are only really dabbling in mediation as a means of keeping their hands in, retaining their sanity and temporising until something better comes up.

There are some good courses on mediation both within the IP sphere and outside it, and -- while there is little case law on the topic unless you count domain name dispute resolutions --while there is also a small but growing body literature on the subject, it seems to me that there is not much that's available on the subject which is so close to so many people's hearts, and that is their wsallets. How do you bill for your services with genuine conviction and turn IP mediation into a real living? Or is it, like a practice based on a minor IP right like registered designs, always likely to be the icing on the top of the cake rather than the cake itself?

Mediation Skills

I hope you all subscribe to fellow SOLO, Justin Patten's e-zine as his articles are always stimulating and interesting. His latest offering starts:

"Set Aside Your Legal Skills to Become an Effective Mediator

A recent article by Sir Henry Brooke, dealing with his new career as a mediator set me thinking about the different skill sets that mediators and lawyers need to do their jobs effectively.

Sir Henry Brooke is a retired Judge and became a Lord Justice of Appeal in 1996 and Vice-President of the Civil Division of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales in 2003. In the article he wrote about his personal perceptions and experiences:
"The advocate’s skills are to conquer the details of a dispute, to give clients high quality dispassionate advice about the pros and cons of pre-trial settlement offers, and if settlement fails, to place their case clearly and persuasively before the court or tribunal, whether in written or oral submissions.
The skills of a judge, on the other hand, are to conquer the details of a dispute, to read or listen attentively to the arguments on both sides, and then to deliver a judgment, whether orally or in writing, which shows that one understands what the dispute is about and is giving clear reasons for preferring one side’s case rather than the other.

A mediator’s skills are different. Of course he or she also must conquer the details of a dispute in order to secure the trust of both parties. But there the similarities end."

Sir Henry Brooke raises an important point. It’s not a natural switch for someone trained in the law, as a judge or a lawyer, to adopt the completely new stance of a mediator."

It was just the insight I needed to understand a threatening letter I was dealing with for a client. I knew the writer was a trained mediator and the letter positively dripped with mediation cliches, but the legal basis for the claim was dubious and poorly articulated. I realised that mediation organisations were amongst the first to offer training to patent and trademark attorneys and these opportunities were taken up to fill the gap in the patent attorneys' formation for legal and litigation skills.

I question whether mediation training is an effective substitute for litigation training. A fully trained litigator may benefit from mediation training. Certainly most major law firm litigators advertise the mediation qualifications of their members but I wonder how many of them use these skills in the initial assertive stages of litigation. Fortunately the legal training organisations are now making formal training in litigation skills more widely available.