2021: Promoting the interests of the profession
One of our key strategic goals in 2021 was to continue passionately representing and promoting the interests of our members and of the wider profession.
Brexit and representation
The start of 2021 signalled the conclusion of the post-Brexit transition phase, with the UK now sitting completely outside of the EU.
For trade marks and designs this meant a fundamental change, with EU Trade Marks and Registered Community Designs no longer covering the UK.
To counteract this potential loss of rights, and one of the most significant developments, we saw more than two million trade marks and designs recreated on UK register.
This was broadly carried out by the UK IPO in line with the solution we initially set out back in 2016.
This minimised the risk to rights holders and ensured legal certainly by maintaining the scope of coverage of the rights in the UK.
With such a fundamental change, there were inevitably questions and issues that arose. On behalf of our members we maintained a continuous dialogue with senior UK IPO officials and posed a large volume of questions to them, and kept members updated on the answers.
As of 1st January 2021, many UK-based practitioners were no longer able to take on new matters before the EUIPO, a significant development for our members
UK practitioners were able to continue acting on matters that were pending at the end of 2020. This brought questions from members, which we were able to seek and provide answers to from the EUIPO.
We fought hard for the address for service rules to be changed in the UK to help begin to level the playing field between UK and EU practitioners. These changes began to have an impact and our members saw large volumes of work before the UK IPO.
We kept members informed at every stage, with regular email and website updates.
We spoke to representatives from many of our members’ firms in depth about the impact of Brexit and where our campaigning attention should be.
From this it was clear that representation before the UK IPO was a vital issue that we had the potential to make a difference on.
Off the back of these meetings, we began building a case for changing the rules on who can be a representative before the UK IPO.
The case for change would require a large volume of evidence and provide practical and realistic solutions that will make the UK’s IP system better for all. This is an important piece of work and we plan to take this forward in 2022.
Law and Practice
We continued to maintain and strengthen our working relationships and partnerships with key officials at the EUIPO, UK IPO and WIPO.
WIPO is a key organisation for our profession, even more so in a postBrexit environment, and we ensured that we reinforced this relationship.
Despite Brexit, the EUIPO remains an important stakeholder for us and our members. We continued to engage with and assist the EUIPO on matters including its convergence programme
Exhaustion was one of the final outstanding items from Brexit without a clear outcome. We collaborated with other user associations, including CIPA, IPLA and FICPI-UK, to draw a consensus that the status quo was the most appropriate outcome, at least in the short-term.
We responded on behalf of the trade mark profession to the UK IPO’s consultation on exhaustion suggesting that the status quo should be maintained for at least three years.
We work closely with the UK IPO on practice matters, and during 2021 provided constructive feedback on issues with comparable rights, the trade mark tribunal and forms amongst many other important issues.
Digital transformation is high on the UK IPO’s agenda with its ‘One IPO’ project in full swing. We ensured we engaged and continue to feed into this on behalf of our profession to provide an IP practitioners’ perspective on new functionality and improvements that could be made.
With many in our membership continuing to work remotely and with restrictions and guidelines to avoid crowded spaces still in place, we had to make sure that our members continued to be supported.
In 2021 we offered more online events than ever before giving members the opportunity to learn, develop, share knowledge and earn CPD.
We also continued to hold committee meetings and Council meetings remotely to ensure everyone was able to attend in a safe way.
Mental wellbeing has been a topic felt even more keenly than usual during the pandemic. We made sure that appropriate support was available
We signposted to the support provided by LawCare and Jonathan’s Voice in particular, as well as providing our own online content and guidance.