Why I don’t want to be a General Counsel This week has seen some extraordinary questioning of, and evidence from, in-house lawyers at the Post Office Horizon Inquiry. The Inquiry is being live-streamed, and more lawyers are due to appear next week. IP Draughts recommends that readers spend a few minutes watching the cross-examination of legal witnesses. This seems a good time to re-post the attached blog article from five years ago. While not all of the lawyers in the Post Office case are General Counsel, the points made in the earlier blog apply most forcefully to GCs ..read more

Last week, at the UCL Faculty of Laws in London, IP Draughts (together with around 30 expert speakers) ran the 11th annual outing of a five-day course,  IP Transactions: Law and Practice. This year we had 33 students; like them, IP Draughts is still processing information from the course. Here are a few of the points that stood out for him: The next generation of speakers. IP Draughts counted 11 new partners, counsel and associates speaking on the course. To pick out a couple, Hayley Gow and Maria McAlister, both senior associates from Ashurst LLP, gave us an interesting talk on Tuesday ..read more

On 28 March 2023, the UK National Health Service’s Health Research Authority published a draft of a new template agreement. See https://www.hra.nhs.uk/about-us/news-updates/call-for-comments-on-new-study-agreement-template/ That webpage explains the purpose of the new agreement in the following terms: The draft Investigator Initiated Study Agreement is proposed for future use between non-commercial sponsors and commercial organisations providing support for investigator-initiated trials. These are research studies where the research idea comes from a non-commercial sponsor but that also recei ..read more

A dispute between a “big name” academic scientist and an entrepreneur over their spinout company went to arbitration. Not recently. In the nineteenth century. It concerned the electric telegraph and Charles Wheatstone, famous as the inventor of the Wheatstone Bridge (the dispute was not about the bridge). It went to arbitration. Fascinating stuff, described in this old blog post. Academic inventors and investors: an eternal story ..read more

Regular readers of this blog may recall that, earlier this year, IP Draughts organised a one-day conference at UCL on the implications of the High Court’s judgment in the case of Oxford University Innovation v Oxford Nanoimaging Limited [2022] EWHC 3200 (Pat). A recording of the event is now publicly available on the UCL Laws website at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/events/2024/feb/universities-commercialisation-implications-oxford-case The recording covers all but one of the sessions of the conference. The second session, on whether students are consumers under UK consumer protection law, has be ..read more

Lord Chancellor, Alex Chalk MP Last week, the Lord Chancellor, on behalf of the UK Government, announced that new legislation will provide a “crackdown on ‘gagging orders’ to protect victims’ ability to access support”. The press release is here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/crackdown-on-gagging-orders-to-protect-victims-ability-to-access-support According to that press release, the legislation will provide that: NDAs cannot be legally enforced if they prevent victims from reporting a crime and will ensure information related to criminal conduct can be discussed with the following gro ..read more

A recent case in the English High Court reminds us that contract clauses that limit or exclude liability typically don’t apply to contractual debts. The case is Costcutter Supermarkets Group Ltd v Vaish & Anor [2024] EWHC 152 (KB) and the judgment can be found here: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/KB/2024/152.html This case was an appeal to the High Court from a decision in the County Court. The key clause of the contract read as follows: 19.2 Subject to clause 19.1 and 18.1 the total liability of either party shall in respect of all acts, omissions, events and occurrences whether ari ..read more

Preparations are under way for the 2024 outing of our one-week course, IP Transactions: Law and Practice, which will run at the UCL Faculty of Laws in London from 15-19 April. Our 30 or so speakers are updating their materials, and we have a good number of people attending. The course has been running since 2013, and has won two awards: a Law Society Excellence Award (Highly Commended) and a UCL Provost’s Teaching Award. IP Draughts is delighted to see some new speakers this year as well as people who have been teaching on the course since it started. They include IP and commercial law experts ..read more

Some readers will be familiar with the traditional legal bookshop that occupies one of the arched entrance ways to Lincoln’s Inn, at the back of the Royal Courts of Justice. It is great to see our book, Execution of Documents, being featured in one of their display windows ..read more

IP Draughts is delighted to announce the publication of the 4th edition of Execution of Documents, which is published by the Law Society of England and Wales. He received his 6 free copies in the post today, and it should be available more widely in about a week’s time. We were originally commissioned to write the first edition of this work about 20 years ago. The latest edition runs to 490 pages. It describes the formalities for valid execution of a range of types of documents – e.g. contracts, deeds, powers of attorney, affidavits, and statutory declarations – by a range of types of organis ..read more