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IP & Commercial Contracts Update

New appointment

Our IP & Commercial Contracts team was delighted to welcome Sarah Cashmore to its ranks in August this year. Sarah is a newly qualified solicitor who trained at a global firm and most recently was seconded to the in-house legal team at Heineken UK. There she was involved in dealing with a wide variety of IP and commercial contract matters including distribution, IT, sponsorship and some regulatory work.

The team advises clients in a wide variety of industry sectors but has seen significant growth in the drinks industry sector where Sarah’s appointment and experience will be particularly welcome.

IP100

We are involved with ‘IP100’ which is an intellectual property league table and network. It has been set up by Metis Partners, together with BQ magazine which compiles a league table, sponsored by the Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banks, of innovative private sector companies in relation to their investment in, and use of, IP.

The IP100 Club provides a networking opportunity for member companies in addition to the profile provided by listing in the league table. MBM Commercial is the IP100 ‘legal champion’ and hosted a successful 1P100 event this summer.  A number of our clients have joined IP100 and we are keen to encourage more to do so.

Sarah recently attended an IP100 event in Glasgow and you can read her blog here https://mbmcommercial.co.uk/Latest-Blogs/Blogs/Ip100-event-october-2016.html.

Please contact Andy Harris or Sarah Cashmore if you wish to discuss joining IP100 or want to know more about how it might assist your business.

It’s all about the data

In our last newsletter we looked at some of the key impending changes to the data protection landscape. Those changes are to some extent ‘up in the air’ thanks to Brexit. However we would be surprised if implementation didn’t proceed largely as planned.

Whatever happens with Brexit, the UK will want to ensure that it continues to implement robust data protection laws.  Sending personal data beyond the confines of the EEA requires particular safeguards to be met. The European Commission has a list of non-EEA countries which are deemed to have sufficiently robust data protection laws in place to meet these safeguards.  The UK will want to be on that list if it no longer remains within the EEA. Otherwise it will be more difficult for   companies within the EEA to send personal data to UK companies.

The US has had particular issues here. As it is not deemed to have sufficiently strong data protection laws to merit making the EC’s list, it had to introduce the Safe Harbour initiative as a mechanism to allow compliant EU to US transfers of personal data to be achieved more easily. This initiative was held to be invalid last year causing widespread uncertainty, and a new initiative (the EU-US Privacy Shield) has now been introduced as its replacement, which it is hoped will be more successful.

Big data opportunities

We continue to see increasing opportunities for clients in relation to the use and monetisation of their business data. This may have less to do with development of ‘Big Data’ processing capabilities and more to do with the ‘internet of things’ and the increasing amount of data we generate and consume as part of our daily lives.

Allied to this is the constant need to ensure proper data security against increasingly sophisticated means of attack and unauthorised access.

We will be running a series of seminars early next year which will be looking at some of the key issues regarding both the monetisation and security of data.

For further details on any of the above, please contact:

Andy Harris
Partner and Head of IP & Commercial Contracts
andy.harris@mbmcommercial.co.uk
0131 226 8208

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