Our Practice Areas

Our Law firm provides a full range of services related to Intellectual and Industrial Property, including unfair competition and anti-trust law. This does not only mean previous consultation and advise on legal aspects related to these matters but also their prosecution, enforcement and experienced litigation before Spanish and Community Courts as well as Arbitration bodies.

Any new project requires proper legal advice, starting from clearance, classification of goods and all the necessary steps for a proper trademark filing. At Salvador Ferrandis & Partners our IP Attorneys will help you to define the best strategy and course of action. Indeed this also applies to other IP rights such as for designs, patents and copyright.

Our objective is to help our clients to develop the favourable conditions for the exploitation of their IP rights and the related value brought about by these rights. In this regard you can count on the experience of our IP Attorneys in relation to all types of contractual issues, including licensing, distribution and technology transfer.

Our legal advisory services are not exclusively targeted at traditional firms, but are also for those in the ICT sector: software developers and online businesses are among our clients. IP Law plays a major role in these entrepreneurship projects, but other branches of law are equally relevant: domain names, personal data protection, software protection or cybercrime among them.

IP Rights enforcement would be the following leg. To this end we organize IP protection at Customs, we prepare and file Civil and Criminal Actions before the competent Courts, from interlocutory injunctions to main actions.

Our high specialisation in IP is supported by our network at national and international level of high specialised lawyers in other fields of Law such as tax, commercial and labor Law. At Salvador Ferrandis & Partners you get the best legal advice from A to Z.

Trademarks

From a legal point of view, a trademark is a sign which serves to distinguish the goods and services of one organisation from those of another. In other words, trademarks are exclusive rights used in order to indicate the origin of services and products, their quality and reputation within the marketplace.

In these terms it is clear that trademarks play a crucial role in the daily functioning of any undertaking; they are of the utmost relevance from a marketing and strategic point of view, providing a given product or service with an additional added value that might, in a certain situation, influence the purchase decision in one way or another.

Therefore, trademarks constitute a real asset for any company, and as such, due care has to be put in their daily use and defence.

At Salvador Ferrandis and Partners we are very much aware of the value of a trademark and the relevance it has for our clients. As a consequence, it is our motto to provide our clients with a full and personalised service, covering the whole life of a trademark from preliminary availability searches and strategic counselling, registration, to negotiation of licenses and any other type of agreement (e.g coexistence) and, should that be the case, litigation.

Our expertise covers trademarks issues at national, Community and International level. These three spheres have relevant links and points in common. Interaction among them and their very own peculiarities must be taken into account in order to adopt the best approach in a given situation. Our professionals, both at registration, negotiation and litigation levels are completely familiar with all these features, being capable of guaranteeing a flawless service for the benefit of our clients.

Patents

Technology is growing fast; modern society is eager to have new technical breakthroughs that raise the standard of living and make our everyday life easier and more convenient. With the aim of being the first on the market and get a significant competitive advantage, economic operators usually invest large amounts of money in research activities. Outcomes deriving from these activities must be protected in order to allow companies to exploit them commercially and get the appropriate return on their investments.

This protection is articulated by means of patents and in some countries as in Spain utility models are available for minor inventions.

At Salvador Ferrandis and Partners we offer a comprehensive service in the scope of technical inventions, meaning patents and utility models; our firm has a consolidated experience in all the stages related to the protection and enforcement of these rights.

Firstly, based on the acknowledgement of the relevance it has, in order to have strong IP rights, we provide strategic counselling and help to design a proper line of action, analysing hand in hand with our clients their technical portfolio. This helps them to take the best approach and decide which inventions might be the subject of a robust IP title and therefore are worthier of protection.

At this stage, we handle the entire registration process, regardless of whether it is national, European (European Patent Office) or international (PCT, PPH). Our professionals are highly familiar with registration practices in all these procedures and are authorised to act before any registration office.

Once protection is granted by means of a valid title, we help our clients to get the most out of their rights. Strategic support in negotiation and bargaining is key, for instance, in order to get a good return from a licensing agreement.

Finally, and should that be the case, our staff is highly qualified in order to enforce any patent in Court national or internationally. Our experienced lawyers possess the skills both at legal and technical spheres to define the scope, interpret and defend any claim whether in order to state its validity or to claim the existence of an infringement. Summing up, from Salvador Ferrandis and Partners, we guarantee a personalised and complete professional advice in the field of protection of technical inventions from the development of the idea to the exploitation of the invention on the market.

Counterfeiting and Piracy

Unfortunately, counterfeited and pirated goods are part of our day-to-day life: these products make an unauthorized use of protected signs, works or inventions diminishing the legitimate efforts carried out by right holders and causing an evident damage to their interests and those of the general public.

In the last years, much awareness has been raised on counterfeiting and piracy due to the risks embodied by these products in economical, health and safety terms. As a result both right holders and end users are adopting a new approach towards this phenomenon.

This new approach to counterfeiting and piracy has its corollary in the recent creation of the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights that will have its seat in Alicante and that will produce very valuable inputs in order to tackle the dissemination and traffic of these products.

At Salvador Ferrandis and Partners we help our clients to fight against this detrimental use of their intangible assets and enforce their rights according to their interests. For this purpose we can pledge the corresponding legal actions both in the civil and criminal spheres, and additionally apply for any of the measures foreseen in Regulation 608/2003 before customs authorities to block the illegal importation of these goods into the European Union.

Copyright

Cultural diversity is a must in modern societies. Balance between protection and freedom of use of cultural content is in the spotlight worldwide.

On the one hand, artists and right holders need a clear and straightforward legal framework in order to defend their creations and be able to commercially exploit them without undue interferences from third parties.

On the other hand, end users claim for massive and low-price or even free access to cultural content.

The interest clash is clear with this background; copyright systems, doctrine and practitioners debate on which should be the best approach. The intermediation of collective societies -for certain types of works- makes the scenario even more dodgy.

The situation gets even more complex, and this is one of the core issues for copyright nowadays, if account is taken of the international aspect of copyright both in terms of creation and exploitation.

Copyright contracts are concluded more and more frequently between parties located in different States. In addition, the appearance of new technologies e.g. the internet, promotes new practices and business models that, in some cases, shatter the traditional conception of copyright protection by constituting a new and massive way in which copyrighted content can be shared, setting aside any geographical border.

This international perspective means that to some extent copyright cases get an additional level of complexity that must be taken into due account.

At Salvador Ferrandis and Partners we are very much aware of the complexity and dynamism of copyright protection and the need to be updated on a daily basis in order to provide first class legal advice.

Our professionals amass a deep knowledge in copyright law being able to determine on a case by case basis the best option for our client’s interest. Our lawyers will provide you with personalised advice on copyright licensing, contract drafting, negotiation, exploitation rights or interaction in protection terms with other IP rights (such as designs or trademarks) and will equally represent your interests efficiently in Court regardless of whether it is a National or International issue.

Information Technologies

If our society were to be described in any way, it would be as the “Information Society”. The boost suffered for information technologies (IT) in the last decades has been overwhelming and affects every single aspect of our daily routine.

Massive deployment of the Internet is already a reality and IP in all its aspects is likewise affected. In these terms the digital environment has become a new scenario for IP enforcement. The new international dimension pictured by worldwide availability of online content imposes new challenges for IP attorneys and end users.

Internet has created a complete parallel world that imposes new peculiarities to be taken into account for the proper defence of IP rights. IT technologies have boosted new business models based on online exploitation of IP rights. On the other side of the coin, the Internet also provides potential IP rights infringers with plenty of new ways in which to operate in detriment of the legitimate right holders.

Moreover, allocation of domain names is a vivid question at this moment; companies are willing to protect those domains that better identify their businesses online. The new ICANN generic Top Level Domain Names is multiplying the possibilities of obtaining an appropriate name, but it may also give raise to new cyber squatting problems (including conflicts between domain names and trademarks).

In Salvador Ferrandis and Partners we have a solid experience in dealing with all the new challenges and possibilities derived from the deployment of the Internet. Our professionals have a consolidated expertise in dealing with the new legal challenges imposed by the internet in terms of IP (liability of intermediaries, online distribution and exhaustion of rights, use of adwords, file sharing…), having been involved in some of the leading cases in this field.

But IT is not only relevant in terms of pure IP exploitation. In addition, these technologies have created new fields of action that even being to some extent connected to IP, go a step further in legal terms: electronic commerce (B2B, B2C) or data protection are clear examples of this.

Companies willing to operate on the internet and profit from the huge possibilities offered by the digital market must comply with the requirements imposed legally.

Web audits, in which all the requirements to be fulfilled in order to operate online are analysed, constitute therefore a must in the strategy to be considered by any company before the launch of its online business with all the due guarantees.

Making a long story short, at Salvador Ferrandis and Partners we understand the huge potential of the new online reality in all its aspects. As such, we are committed to the provision of a comprehensive service including all the relevant issues from IP infringement and exploitation to data privacy and e-commerce requirements.