IP·Trade Secrets·Unfair Competition
A company's most valuable assets are often the ones you cannot see.
Technology, data, brands and know-how now account for most of what a company is worth. Unlike physical assets, however, their boundaries are rarely self-evident: without rights secured in advance, enforcing them after an infringement becomes difficult. MAST engages at the point where those rights are created — advising on registration, contracts and internal controls together — so that a defensible position is already in place when a dispute materialises.
Departures of key personnel, imitation by competitors and misuse of ideas shared during collaboration arrive without warning, and delay makes recovery harder. MAST has handled trade secret and unfair competition matters end to end, from injunctions halting the conduct quickly through to civil damages, criminal complaints and the investigation that follows. Having acted both for parties asserting infringement and for those defending against it, we assess the merits and the evidence realistically and set out the most practical route to resolution.
Key Practices
Intellectual Property
- + Strategic registration and protection of copyrights, trademarks, portrait rights and design rights
- + Trademark and copyright infringement disputes, including criminal complaints
- + Patent disputes, allocation of rights in joint works, and employee invention compensation claims
- + Review and negotiation of content distribution and licensing agreements
- + IP-backed financing, valuation and monetisation advisory
Trade Secret Protection & Enforcement
- + Civil and criminal action against trade secret leakage by departing employees
- + Injunctions restraining transfer to competitors and prohibiting trade secret infringement
- + Building trade secret management systems, NDAs and confidentiality undertakings
- + Criminal defense for companies and individuals accused of trade secret infringement
Unfair Competition
- + Injunctions and damages claims against competitors' unfair competition practices
- + Response to consumer confusion as to source and dilution of well-known marks
- + Emerging disputes over unauthorised use of work product and data scraping
- + Remedies for misappropriation of ideas disclosed during business negotiations