Inventions and Patents

We can support you in all matters relating to inventions and patents, including for example

  • Advice on what is patentable (patentability)
  • analysis of portfolios
  • challenges to competitor patents
  • commercial arrangements with patents
  • commercialisation
  • drafting and filing patent applications
  • due diligence
  • enforcing patents against competitors
  • examination (prosecution) of patents to have them granted by national patent offices
  • freedom to operate (infringement clearance) advice and strategy
  • invalidity analysis
  • internal processes you can use for capturing inventions and managing patents
  • international patent applications
  • inventorship advice
  • licensing
  • maintenance and renewal of patents
  • managing your patent portfolio / estate
  • monitoring competitor activity and patents
  • ownership advice
  • patent disputes including oppositions and litigation
  • patent strategy
  • protection strategies
  • searching (infringement, novelty)

Insights relating to patents

The Quiet Decay: Why IP Value Slips When No One Is Watching

Intellectual property rarely fails loudly. It fails in the gap between filing and follow-through — the priority date no one re-checked, the order no one renewed, the AI agent no one supervised. This month’s posts make one point together: the threat to your most valuable…

When Your IP Becomes a Revenue Line: Three Signals From the Past Week

The most valuable lesson in intellectual property this week wasn’t a single ruling — it was a pattern. Across a landmark licensing deal, a patent that collapsed over one character, and a Congressional hearing on the rules themselves, the same question kept surfacing: is your…

The Pharmaceutical Patent Cliff Has a Timetable — And It’s Public

IP Organiser’s recently compiled record of every pharmaceutical patent term extension granted in Australia maps roughly 1,600 extended patents across 850 products, and the patterns are worth reading closely. Activity is concentrated: a handful of originators (Novartis well out in front, then Pfizer, Roche, AstraZeneca…

Strategic Amendments in Patent Litigation: Insights

Amending the basis of your validity challenge in patent litigation is never just a procedural move — it is a strategic play with real commercial consequences. What stands out in AstraZeneca AB v Pharmacor Pty Ltd (No 3) [2026] FCA 565 is a good reminder…

Your IP Strategy Is Only as Good as Your Board’s Questions

A McKinsey study found that 44% of directors said their boards simply reviewed and approved management’s proposed strategies—and only 10% felt they fully understood the industry dynamics they were governing. For IP-intensive businesses, that gap is expensive. Inventions, brands, data and know-how are often the…

When Your Strongest Asset Is What You Leave Off the Label

The most valuable thing a competitor can do to your patent is comply with the law around it. That is the quiet lesson for IP-intensive businesses in the US Supreme Court’s unanimous June 2026 ruling in Hikma v. Amarin (read it here). Amarin held a…

The Reverse Payment You Didn’t Know You Made

A patent settlement can look perfectly clean on its face and still carry antitrust risk buried in its economics. That is the lesson from an $885 million jury verdict handed down in Boston this month, where Takeda was found liable for effectively paying a generic…

Built Before the Fight: What May’s IP Decisions Reward

Strip the case names away and one pattern runs through this month’s posts: the decisive moment in an IP matter almost never happens in the courtroom. It happens years earlier — in the words drafted into a claim, the honesty of a brand at first…

When Your Own Words Become Your Cage: The Cost of Claim Drafting Choices

A decade-long battle over an anti-scaling method for the Bayer process has just delivered a sharp reminder that patent claims are commercial instruments, not afterthoughts. In Nalco Company v Cytec Industries Inc [2026] FCAFC 72, the Full Federal Court upheld findings that Nalco’s original claims…

When Your Patent Isn’t Built for the Road Ahead

How quickly a patent can lose its strategic value when the underlying disclosure isn’t built to withstand real‑world scrutiny. In the Federal Court’s decision in Orikan v VMS (No 2), Orikan’s infringement case faltered on multiple grounds, but most interestingly because the patent specification couldn’t…

AI Isn’t Your Advantage—Your IP Strategy Is

The recent McKinsey article “Using AI to boost productivity is unlikely to create a sustainable advantage” (read it here) offers a timely reminder for business owners with valuable IP portfolios: AI-driven efficiency gains won’t deliver lasting advantage, but using AI to reshape offerings, business models,…

A simple little decision brings an important reminder

The Davies v Lazer Safe decision is a timely reminder that in IP disputes, leverage often sits in the procedural details. The Court clarified that an old filing restriction—tied to documents from long‑finished litigation—had nothing to do with Mr Davies’ attempt to bring a new…

Tangling in your pre-litigation strategy

There can be a lot of uncertainty in deciding whether to commence patent infringement proceedings. They are expensive, and you want to get this decision right. A key factor is often a lack of detailed understanding of the alleged infringing product or process. The patent…

IP update: vaccines, counterfeits, textbook piracy and tm translations

Here’s an update on what’s been happening in the world of IP lately: Silfab acquires EnPV’s solar panel patent portfolio including the Self-Aligned Back Contact (SABC) technology and an associated trade mark. PV Tech, Solar Quarter, Technology News, South Korean Supreme Court held that SK…

AI & IP – a brief update

Artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting many facets of intellectual property law and practice. We have to keep in mind both the challenges AI presents and the opportunities it creates for innovators and legal professionals. Copyright and AI: The US Copyright Office has released reports examining…