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With South Africa lagging behind the rest of the world in terms of patent applications and the establishment of intellectual property rights, the Durban arm of pan-African law firm Adams & Adams is striving to create awareness amongst KwaZulu-Natal businesses of the importance of protecting their intellectual capital
For Vishen Pillay, the only practising patent attorney based in KwaZulu-Natal with an engineering degree, and partner at Adams & Adams, protecting intellectual capital should be a fundamental part of any business strategy. “Registered intellectual property, including patents, trademarks, and registered designs, is of huge value to any business and needs to be seen as the asset it is,” said Pillay.
As Adams & Adams expands, so it strives to educate the market to better understand this.
“In today’s business markets, barriers to entry are so low and the ‘knock-off’ market so big, that a lot of research and development (R&D) and innovation taking place in KZN companies is lost because intellectual capital is not protected,” said Pillay.
It is this very concern that prompted the government to pass a piece of legislation a few years ago calling for the protection of all R&D conducted with government funds before releasing it publically. This sense of protection, says Pillay, needs to become a South African business culture.
And Adams & Adams is working to cement this culture particularly in the specialist fields of engineering and sciences where the speed at which things move means that companies have to constantly innovate to survive.
“With the patent attorneys at our firm experienced in most fields of engineering, software development and sciences such as chemistry and biotechnology, we are able to offer a full range of guidance on what protection is needed for new technologies,” said Pillay.
According to Pillay, it is imperative that any potential invention or new technology be kept strictly confidential until further advice is sought from a patent attorney as any non-confidential disclosure of an invention would in many cases be a bar to subsequent patenting thereof.
Founded in 1908, Adams & Adams boasts a database of more than 12 000 active clients many of whom are in the Fortune 500 and Top 500 local companies. One of the largest intellectual property (IP) practices in the Southern Hemisphere, Adams & Adams is also one of the biggest general law firms in South Africa that provides commercial, property and civil litigation expertise.
And with offices in KZN’s commercial hub of Ridgeside Umhlanga, as well as in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Angola, Mozambique (ARIPO), Cameroon (OAPI), Burundi and Tanzania, Adams & Adams is the largest IP firm in the Southern Hemisphere, with the most extensive physical presence throughout Africa.
Whether it is a patent application, a trademark registration or registered design, Adams & Adams is able to guide all manner of business on how to ensure their intellectual capital is protected.
For more on Adams & Adams visit www.adamsadams.com or call the Durban office on 031 536 8240.