Basis
We will provide you with services related to your intellectual property (IP), including the preparation, prosecution and administration of: applications for IP rights; and granted IP rights.
We are not a patent attorney firm, nor a trademark attorney firm. We are IP consultants, authorised to act on your behalf:
We are not authorised to carry out reserved legal activities as defined by the Legal Services Act 2007. We are not regulated by a professional body.
Unless otherwise agreed, we will assume that any person within your organisation may instruct us on your behalf, unless they clearly do not have the appropriate authority.
It is your responsibility as the client to provide us with clear and complete instructions in good time for us to carry them out. Oral instructions should be confirmed in writing.
It is our responsibility to inform you of any relevant deadlines or time limits involved in the preparation, prosecution and administration of your IP rights and applications, but we cannot accept any responsibility if you fail to provide us with instructions that are timely, clear, and complete enough for us to carry them out within the applicable time limits. Failure to act within applicable time limits may result in the irrevocable loss of IP rights.
You must inform us promptly of any change to:
Many of these changes must be provided to the relevant IP offices. We cannot accept responsibility for any loss of IP applications or rights due to your failure to provide us with information regarding such changes.
Our primary means of written communication with you will be email. It is your responsibility to ensure that you check your emails regularly, and to ensure that our emails to you are not filtered out by any email security provisions or filters.
We cannot accept any responsibility (including in negligence) for any viruses which may enter your system or data. You should perform regular virus checks on all electronic correspondence and files.
During our work for you we may need to instruct third parties to act on your behalf. Such third parties may include foreign patent agents or attorneys, local patent or trademark attorneys, and patent drawing draughtsmen. Such third parties are not part of Robertson IP Limited. We will not be liable for any default or negligence by such third parties. We regularly monitor the performance of such third parties to ensure the quality of the service you receive.
Our charges fall into four categories:
Professional fees relate to the amount of professional time spent on the matter. Our hourly rates are competitive and our professional fees are measured in fifteen minute increments of time. Our professional fees are calculated at the rates which are current when the work is carried out. Please ask of our latest hourly rates.
Where a cap to professional fees has been agreed in writing, we will do our best to keep within said cap until instructions to increase the cap have been received from you. Nevertheless, if you take action which uses professional time, such as telephoning or emailing one of our professional advisors, after the cap has been reached, this will still be charged in excess of the agreed cap.
Service fees are typically fixed fees associated with administrative processes. As far as is possible these will be agreed beforehand in writing, and will typically be charged by us and paid by you before the service is carried out. It is your responsibility to ensure that service fees are paid in a timely manner. We reserve the right to wait until a service fee has been received in our bank account before carrying out the service, even if this means failing to meet a time limit.
Expenses are fees charged by third parties for work relating to your IP rights and applications. These include official fees charged by IP offices, fees of foreign agents and local attorneys, and other expenses incurred on your behalf by Robertson IP. Where possible we will advise you of such expenses in advance, and they will typically be charged by us and paid by you before they are incurred and paid on to the third party. In some circumstances it will be impossible to advise you of expenses in advance, or to calculate the exact amount in advance. It is nevertheless your responsibility to pay all expenses incurred by Robertson IP on your behalf. It is your responsibility to ensure that expenses are paid in a timely manner. We reserve the right to wait until the disbursement has been received in our bank account before paying it to the third party, even if this means failing to meet a time limit.
Administration fees cover our banking and administration costs. They are typically a fixed percentage of expenses incurred. Please ask about our latest administration fee rates.
If you are an associate instructing us on behalf of your client, you will be liable for payment of any professional fees, outlays and expenses incurred by us within the agreed payment term regardless of whether your client has made payment to you for such fees.
When administering your IP rights and applications, we will from time to time receive correspondence on your behalf relating to those IP rights and applications. It is our responsibility to forward these to you. A service fee will be charged to you for forwarding said correspondence, without awaiting your instructions.
In the event that you no longer wish us to act for or advise you on any matter you must inform us immediately in order that we can cease incurring costs on your behalf. You will remain liable for any costs incurred up to the time at which you made us aware that you no longer wish us to act for or advise you.
We may require payment on account, particularly in respect of large items such as charges and expenses to be incurred in foreign filings and actions. When we make such a request, we will usually not carry out any instructed work until the requested payment is in our bank account, so good time should be allowed for this. Any bank interest in respect of money paid on account will accrue to Robertson IP Limited, though no, or minimal interest will normally accrue due to the typically short period of time for which the funds are held in our bank account.
We will always endeavour to provide estimates of future charges in good faith based on our knowledge at the time. However, as charges may be affected by
matters beyond our control and the amount of work involved, such estimates are not binding.
We are able to render invoices to and accept payment from another person nominated by you. However, the ultimate responsibility for making such payment will remain with you.
If a requested payment on account is not made or if an invoice remains unpaid for after the payment period on the invoice, we reserve the right to suspend all work on your behalf. This is without prejudice to our right to invoice for work undertaken before such suspension and to take legal action for the payment of our costs if necessary. We also reserve the right to charge you interest calculated on a daily basis on any overdue amount at the rate of the eight percent above the current Bank of England base rate. We further reserve the right to charge you for all legal expenses incurred in pursuing the overdue amount through the courts.
You will be responsible for the consequences of the suspension of work, which may include the irrevocable loss of, or failure to obtain, IP rights.
You will be responsible for any expenses we incur on your behalf. These expenses may include Patent Office fees, attorney fees, the costs of any experts or other agents (including any translators or foreign lawyers). They may also include such items as photocopying costs, couriers, travel and meeting expenses, and telephone charges. While our own service fees and professional fee hourly rates are predictable, you should appreciate that local representatives’ charges and official fees are outside our control since they may be changed without notice and (in the case of foreign matters) vary with exchange rate fluctuations.
We are a predominantly paperless company and our use of electronic filing systems means that we typically do not retain paper files. Ownership of our paper and electronic files is determined by overriding legal jurisprudence which confirms that certain parts of the files will remain your property and certain parts will remain our property. For the avoidance of doubt, this only relates to the ownership of the physical or electronic correspondence in such files and does not affect ownership of any IP rights. We make no claim to any of your IP rights.
If at any time you wish to transfer your work to another professional advisor, we will release any parts of the files which are your property once you have paid all outstanding invoices. Parts of the files which are our property will remain our property at all times. We will consider any requests from you for copies of parts of files belonging to us. If we agree to release copies of those parts we may charge a reasonable administrative fee to compensate for our time spent making such copies and collating any required accompanying information.
We reserve the right to exercise a lien over any parts of the files until our invoices are paid.
Robertson IP Limited’s liability to you for a breach of your instructions shall be limited to £500,000. We can only limit our liability to the extent the law allows. In particular, we cannot limit our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence.
While acting for you, we are likely to receive confidential information about you as our client. We will keep such information confidential, except where disclosure is required by law or regulation.
In general, we recommend that you restrict the release of, and maintain strict control over, any information not already in the public domain connected with instructions we receive. We would be happy to advise on the desirability of releasing confidential information to the public in specific cases.
We reserve the right to publicise that we act for you on our website in a promotional capacity. However, this is limited to referring to the name of your organisation and no details regarding e.g. the type or nature of work conducted for you will be published.
By instructing us you consent to our processing your personal data as necessary in the course of providing our professional services.
By instructing us you also consent to us transferring your personal data outside of the European Economic Area when necessary in the course of providing our professional services.
Please see our separate data policy for full details on how we process your data.
Any searches you request may be carried out by ourselves, by Patent Offices, or by third party specialists. Due to the limitations and occasional errors in classifications, indices, computer databases, and official records, no search can ever be guaranteed for comprehensiveness or accuracy. We disclaim the fitness of any searches carried out on your behalf, for any purpose.
Any warnings we send on your behalf to a third party has the potential to invoke a counter-claim for unjustified threats of infringement proceedings. Therefore, upon instructing us to send such a warning you agree to indemnify us against any risk of us being sued under such a counter-claim; this allows us to maintain our objectivity in such contentious matters, which would diminish if we were to become a party to any proceedings.
We are legally required to notify the National Crime Agency (NCA) under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 if we become aware of, or suspect, any suspicious activity or circumstance in your financial dealings with us. However, please be advised that, if this situation were to arise, we would not be allowed to inform you that we have notified NCA of any such suspicions. In the event that we deemed it necessary to make such a notification, we would be unable to conduct any further work on your cases until we have specific consent from NCA to do so. Such consent is normally provided quickly; however, there is a possibility that our inability to act for you in such a situation could result in lost rights which we are otherwise looking after for you. Furthermore, we would be unable to warn you of this.
You may terminate our relationship at any time by writing to us. If there are circumstances which prevent us from continuing to act for you, we may terminate the relationship ourselves by giving you reasonable notice. In either case, if the relationship is terminated we will require you to pay our charges and expenses up to and including the date of such termination.
We request that you sign these terms and return them to us. We do not require the originals. If you do not do this we will deem your continuing to instruct us as acceptance of these terms and you shall be bound by them.
These Terms of Business constitute the whole agreement between us and may be relied upon by either party in the event of a dispute. No change to the terms of our agreement will be valid unless agreed in writing with us.
The Courts of England and Wales shall have exclusive jurisdiction to resolve any disputes arising between us.
