IP enforcement, use, and conflicts

Whenever you’re dealing with an infringement situation, we’ll give you our professional opinion and advise you on how to proceed with the resolution process or whether to take the matter to court. For instance, if a competitor accuses you of patent infringement, it’s important to immediately find out if their accusations are substantiated and if your patent is valid or not.

In most cases it’s in the interest of all parties to resolve the conflict as promptly as possible. We’ll watch over your interests by helping you to see your risks and by taking part in negotiations on your behalf. If legal proceedings seem inevitable, we’ll defend your rights in court.

We’ll enforce your trademark rights globally, checking and reporting regularly if any marks confusingly similar to yours have been registered. This is to ensure that no identical trademark exists in parallel.

In case any confusingly similar trademarks come up, you’ll have the option to file an opposition. Our service also includes competitor and domain name monitoring.

If you’re planning an acquisition, a merger, license negotiations or court proceedings, you may want to appraise your intellectual property.

We’ll assess the value and scope of protection of your IP and give our professional statement to investors and companies for selling, buying, licensing or defending your protected property.

Besides using your intellectual property such as patents in your own production, you can also sell or license your property. You may also need a license yourself to be able to use your own patented invention.

A license agreement is a permit to manufacture, develop and/or distribute a protected invention, usually for a royalty that may be a single payment or paid on an ongoing basis.

We also offer our help in intellectual property disputes. Our legal service includes infringement and invalidation assessment, expert statements, defense and attack strategies, and cooperation with other attorneys in court hearings (such as infringement and invalidation proceedings, proceedings for a declaratory judgment or preliminary injunction matters).

Most jurisdictions apply a nine-month opposition period after a patent has been granted. This is to give any third party an opportunity to get a patent revoked by filing an opposition. As a result, the patent may be revoked in full, or the scope of protection conferred by the patent may have to be limited.

After the opposition period has passed, it’s still possible to invalidate a granted patent by filing an invalidation action with a court a law. If a patent becomes invalidated, its legal effect will cease to exist retrospectively, as if the right of protection had never been granted. In Finland, invalidation actions are filed with the Market Court. It’s also possible to take another intellectual property matter to the court at the same time, if it is involved in the same cause.

Any party finding that a particular patent causes them harm may raise an invalidation action. In some cases the Market Court may decide to invalidate only parts of a patent, but the patent holder must still have filed one or more limited patent claims with the court.

The costs of an opposition process are considerably lower than invalidating a patent in court. To save expenses, it’s important to monitor your competitors regularly, finding any harmful patents within the nine-month opposition period.

Even if you haven’t used your invention for commercial purposes, a granted patent may still be valuable to you. For example, there may be technology companies interested in buying your patent. There are also companies that buy patents specifically to license them on to industrial manufacturing companies.

We’re here to help you appraise the value of your patent and find potential buyers.