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.
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. Legal deadlines are monitored by means of a computerised intellectual property database 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 official patent office fees) 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.
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 then 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 helps us to keep you informed about your cases.
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 if you wish, although we may delay the file transfer if you owe us money. We also reserve the right to keep a copy of any part of the file contents.
Any information or documentation that you give us will be treated as strictly confidential, even if you cease to be our client.
Anti-money laundering regulations
Because of the Government's anti-money laundering legislation (in particular the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (the POCA) and the Money Laundering Regulations 2007), we like to check the identity of all new clients, including any other parties on whose behalf they instruct us. In the case of an individual, we will ask to see two original forms of identification and proof of address. For a company, we will seek confirmation of its existence and address and of the authority of the person who instructs us on the company's behalf.
Under 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. Again, please understand that in such situations we must comply with the law.
The firm's Money Laundering Reporting Officer is currently Andrea Brewster.
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're still dissatisfied, you are entitled to take your complaint to the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys (CIPA), to the European Patents Institute (EPI) or to the Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys (ITMA). We are bound by their rules of professional conduct. The Legal Services Ombudsman may also be prepared to investigate your complaint.
Contact details for these bodies are:
CIPA
95 Chancery Lane
London WC2A 1DT
Telephone: 020 7405 9450ITMA
Canterbury House
2-6 Sydenham Road
Croydon CR0 9XE
Telephone: 020 8686 2052
Institute of Professional Representatives before the European Patent Office
PO Box 26 01 12
D-80058 München
GERMANY
Telephone: +49 (89) 242 05 20Legal Services Ombudsman
3rd Floor
Sunlight House
Quay Street
Manchester M3 3JZ
Telephone: 0845 601 0794
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 try to instruct people we believe to be trustworthy and to provide the same high quality of service as Greaves Brewster LLP provides for you.
