NIPC News

Jane Lambert

A new guide to the practice and procedure of the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court ("IPEC") was published yesterday and came into force immediately. It is intended to help users and potential users of the court by explaining how its procedures work and by providing guidelines where appropriate.

Small Claims Track Business outside London
An important announcement of the new guide is that from October 2019, there will be district judges in each of the six Business and Property Court centres outside London (Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle) to hear matters in the IPEC small claims track. Appeals from decisions in the IPEC small claims track will be filed at the relevant appeal centre indicated in PD 52B. A judge of the multi-track will be made available to hear the appeal, either locally or in London, depending on the circumstances of the case and the judge's availability.

Proceedings outside London
Although all previous guides h…

Jane Lambert

I am grateful to Mark Beer for bringing the Standing International Forum of Commercial Courts ("SIFoCC") and its Multilateral Memorandum on Enforcementto my attention in a post on Linkedin.  Mark is now President of the International Association for Court Administration.  I first heard of him when he was Chief Executive of the English speaking common law courts in Dubai known as the Dubai International Financial Centre Courts which I first discussed in DIFC Courtson7 Jan 2011 JDSupra.

SIFoCC was established at a meeting in London of judges of many of the world's commercial courts convened by Lord Thomas (former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales) in May 2017  (see History of SIFoCC).  Its members include the Business and Property of Courts of England and Wales (see Jane Lambert Launch of a Judicial Superhighway12 July 2017 IP Northwest), the Court of Session in Scotland, the High `Court of Northern Ireland, the US District Court for the Southern Distric…

Jane Lambert

Immediately after last Friday's breakfast meeting at Daresbury Sci-Tech, I attended an interactive session with Phil Carvil, the cluster's development manager, exploring how the Daresbury HeathTec Cluster can work with innovators and industry. The official launch had taken place the previous day. Phil began his talk by asking who had attended it. 

Phil explained that the cluster aims to bring together business, academics and the public sector in the North of England. He reminded us that there are 28 universities and more than 1,200 life science companies employing over 50,000 people in the region.  Some 32 of those companies are based in Daresbury itself.

The Cluster's vision is set out in the leaflet Connecting Capabilities.  It is the second health technology cluster in the UK, the first being at Harwell in Oxfordshire. Phil hoped that the two networks would complement each other. He expected businesses on one campus to find partners for projects and venture…

Standard YouTube Licence


Jane Lambert

Sunday was World Creativity and Innovation Day as well as Easter. By a resolution of  27 April 2017, the UN General Assembly designated the 21 April as World Creativity and Innovation Day. All UN member states, UN organizations and other international and regional organizations, as well as civil society, including non-governmental organizations and individuals are invited "to observe the day in an appropriate manner and in accordance with national priorities, in order to raise awareness of the role of creativity and innovation in problem-solving and, by extension, economic, social and sustainable development."

At least one British institution is marking the day.   I spotted this post on the Royal Opera House's Facebook page:



It was, in fact, the House's post that drew my attention to the event and made me look into it.

Creativity and innovation are what intellectual property protects. It is, therefore, appropriate that World Intel…

Jane Lambert

The Lambert Toolkit is a set of precedents (templates) and notes to help universities and business owners draft agreements to decide who should benefit from any technological developments or innovation that might result from research or other work that universities carry out for business.  They are named after Sir Richard Lambert,  a former Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry, member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England and editor of the Financial Times.  I had very little to do with the toolkit though I did attend a meeting chaired by Sir Richard and contributed to the drafting of one of the clauses of at least one of the draft agreements.

Although the draft agreements are not compulsory they do save time and money and minimize the risk of disputes between universities and businesses.  They grew out of a Review of Business-University Collaboration which a committee chaired by Sir Richard compiled in 2001. They have been widely accep…

Jane Lambert

According to the Intellectual Property Office's latest Facts and Figures, there were 382 applications for UK patents from Wales in 2017. That was more than the 158 from Northern Ireland and 296 Northeast England but considerably less than the 2,585 applications from London and the 2,067 from the Southeast.

Developments that may make a difference are the opening of the Menai Science Park (M-SParc) in Angelsey on 1 March 2018 and the construction of the Aberystwyth Innovation and Enterprise Campus.  Like the Pontio Arts and Innovation Centre in Bangor, these are initiatives of two of Wales's research universities to stimulate innovations and economic growth in their local areas.

There are signs that those initiatives are working.  I attended "Pitch Perfect" at M-SParc on 1 March 2019 and wrote about the event in A Good Way to spend St David's Day(2 March 2019).  There were some very good proposals indeed and I think that everything we saw was credible …