Business terms for our clients
Introduction
When you ask Greaves Brewster LLP to do work for you, you become our client. From that point, the following terms will apply to our business relationship. If you'd like us to clarify anything, please don't hesitate to ask. Otherwise, we shall assume that you have understood and accepted our terms.
Who will be doing your work
Your work will be done by, or under the direct supervision of, a fully qualified Chartered Patent Attorney or Registered Trade Mark Attorney, as appropriate. All of our attorneys are regulated by the Intellectual Property Regulation Board (IPReg). We are therefore bound by IPReg's Code of Conduct, which you can access from the IPReg website at www.ipreg.org.uk.
Formalities and file maintenance, including the monitoring of deadlines, may also be carried out by our administrative staff, who are experienced in such matters and whose work is overseen by the partners of the firm. We monitor legal deadlines using a computerised intellectual property database which is designed specifically for the purpose.
Our partners and staff act on behalf of Greaves Brewster LLP, which is a limited liability partnership. Your business relationship is with the LLP and not with any individual who carries out work for you on the firm's behalf.
Our charges
We charge by the hour for the time we spend on technical and legal aspects of your work. In addition, we make fixed charges for certain types of work, such as filing a new patent application: these charges are to cover the associated administration.
Before we start work we will, on request, give you an indication of the likely foreseeable costs. This will include our charges and any other costs ("disbursements") which we may have to pay out on your behalf.
It is often difficult to predict exactly how much time a job may take. Our cost indication is therefore only approximate and not a binding quote. However, we will always try to keep within our indication and in particular we will warn you in advance if it is likely to be exceeded, so that you have the opportunity to ask us to stop work.
If you are unhappy or unclear about our charges, or have a budget you need to keep within, please discuss this with us before we start work, to avoid misunderstandings later.
We will usually invoice you after we've completed a piece of work for you. However, new clients may be asked for a deposit towards the cost of a first project, and it is our policy to ask for payment in advance if significant disbursements (such as patent office fees or overseas attorneys' charges) are involved. If we have to work on a file for more than a month or so we may send you an "interim" invoice to keep things up to date, allowing you more easily to keep track of your intellectual property costs. Alternative charging arrangements may be possible if you need them.
Our invoices are due for payment within 30 days of issue. We may charge interest on late payments, and in exceptional cases we may suspend work on your files until you have settled our invoices.
Please also note that, unless you agree some other arrangement with us, we will regard the person (or company) that instructs us as responsible for paying us.
Instructing us
We can only work to your specific instructions. If we need your instructions by a certain deadline (for instance, a deadline set by a patent office), we will tell you about that and do our best to remind you as the deadline approaches. However, ultimately it is your responsibility, once we've requested your input, to make sure that we receive it in good time.
Keeping us informed
The quality of our advice depends very much on the information you give us, for instance about your technical work, your competitors and your business strategies generally. Please keep us up to date about your activities and plans – we like to hear how you're getting on and we can more easily tailor our advice to suit your needs.
It is also important to tell us, promptly, of any change in your contact details, or in the ownership of your rights and assets. It is usually advisable to record such changes at the relevant patent offices and trade mark registries, and in some cases it is crucial to do so. Also, it allows us to keep you informed about your cases.
If we do not have your up to date contact details, then we cannot take responsibility for informing you about developments on your cases, in particular procedural deadlines. This may result in loss of some or all of your intellectual property rights, as we will be unable to take action on your cases without your instructions.
Your files
Whilst we are acting for you, and unless you say otherwise, we will keep our files relating to your work. We will hand these files over to you, or to another patent attorney, if you wish. However we reserve the right to delay the file transfer until you have paid all our outstanding charges. We also reserve the right to keep a copy of any part of the file contents. We may ask you to reimburse us for the costs involved in transferring files.
Any information or documentation that you give us will be treated as strictly confidential, even if you cease to be our client.
Unless you instruct otherwise, we will keep the files – and the associated electronic records – for at least six years after the relevant intellectual property right (for example, a patent or a trade mark registration) has expired. For a "family" of associated rights we will keep all files for at least six years after the last of the rights has expired. Files are generally kept on our premises although older files may be stored, under appropriate conditions, by an external contractor. Files which we decide not to keep will be safely destroyed, in a way that safeguards the confidentiality of their contents.
Anti-money laundering regulations
Under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (the POCA), we will notify to the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) any suspicious circumstances relating to our clients' financial affairs. We are not however allowed to tell you if we have notified any suspicious circumstance involving your work. In the unlikely event that we had to make such a notification, we could not conduct any further work on your files, or organise any financial transactions on your behalf, until we had clearance to do so from SOCA. Whilst we will always do our best to obtain clearance as quickly as possible, nevertheless our inability to act for you in such a situation could jeopardise the rights that we handle for you and we would be unable to warn you of that. Please understand that in such situations we must comply with the law.
Complaints
We hope that you will be happy with the work we do for you and with the way you are treated here.
If you're not, please let us know and we will do all we can to put matters right. In the first instance, we would prefer you to talk to the person handling your work. But if you're not happy about doing that, you can speak to another of our partners.
If you wish to make a formal complaint, please write to The Senior Partner, Greaves Brewster LLP, Indigo House, Cheddar Business Park, Cheddar, BS27 3EB, United Kingdom. Your complaint will be reviewed by at least two of our partners and we will reply to you within seven days of receiving it.
If you are still dissatisfied, you are entitled to take your complaint to the Intellectual Property Regulation Board (IPReg). Alternatively, if the complaint relates to work done on a European patent or patent application, you can refer it to the European Patents Institute (EPI). Contact details for these bodies are:
IPReg
3rd Floor
95 Chancery Lane
London WC2A 1DT
Telephone: 020 7440 9371
Fax: 020 7440 9374
Website: www.ipreg.org.uk
Email: ipregipreg.org.uk
Institute of Professional Representatives before the European Patent Office
PO Box 260112
80058 München
GERMANY
Telephone: +49 89 242 05 20
Fax: +49 89 242 05 220
Website: www.patentepi.com
Email: infopatentepi.com
IPReg deals with complaints about professional misconduct. If however your complaint relates to the quality of our service, the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys (CIPA) or the Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys (ITMA) may be able to help you. Later in 2010, the Office for Legal Complaints is expected to begin operating a Legal Ombudsman scheme, and this will then deal with all complaints of poor service against patent and trade mark attorneys. We will always do our best to resolve such complaints ourselves, but if you are still dissatisfied then we would encourage you to contact the Legal Ombudsman for assistance.
Contact details for CIPA and ITMA are:
CIPA
95 Chancery Lane
London WC2A 1DT
Telephone: 020 7405 9450
Fax: 020 7430 0471
Website: www.cipa.org.uk
Email: mailcipa.org.uk
ITMA
Canterbury House
2-6 Sydenham Road
Croydon CR0 9XE
Telephone: 020 8686 2052
Fax: 020 8680 5723
Website: www.itma.org.uk
Email: tmitma.org.uk
The Office for Legal Complaints (and in due course the Legal Ombudsman) can be contacted by telephone on 0121 503 2930, or by email at enquiriesofficeforlegalcomplaints.org.uk. Its website is at www.officeforlegalcomplaints.org.uk.
Our liability
Because Greaves Brewster LLP is a limited liability partnership, any claim in connection with work done by us will be the responsibility of the firm. By asking Greaves Brewster LLP to work for you, you agree that you will not bring any claim in connection with that work against any individual member, partner or employee of the firm.
If we need to instruct other professionals (such as solicitors, barristers, overseas attorneys, searchers or draftsmen) in connection with the work we do for you, we will do so as your agent. We cannot accept liability for the actions of such professionals although we will always instruct people we believe to be trustworthy and to provide the same high quality of service as Greaves Brewster LLP provides for you.
Greaves Brewster LLP carries professional indemnity insurance, of an amount deemed appropriate by the Intellectual Property Regulation Board, through PAMIA Limited. PAMIA Limited is a specialist provider of insurance for patent and trade mark attorneys (www.pamia.co.uk).
