Cordelia Payne

Consultant Partner

Intellectual Property Team

About
Expertise
Recent Work
Accolades

Cordelia leads the Intellectual Property team at Acuity Law.

She qualified into the IP department at Harbottle & Lewis LLP, where she was employed until March 2012. During that time, she worked as in-house counsel for Virgin Atlantic Airways, Argus Media and on the brand protection team for the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG). Cordelia is particularly conscious of her clients’ commercial needs, which she puts down to these early secondment experience.

In October 2015, she joined Maple & Black Law as its first and only IP lawyer, singlehandedly building the IP practice until the firm merged with Acuity Law.

Cordelia has extensive expertise advising on both contentious and non-contentious IP matters. She specialises in the protection, exploitation, and enforcement of all intellectual property rights, with a particular focus on copyright, trade marks, design rights and confidential information.

She regularly appears in actions at the UK and EU intellectual property registries and ICANN under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. She also provides technical and strategic pre-action advice to clients on civil actions for infringement of IP rights and passing off.

Her non-contentious work involves brand protection advice, including filing and enforcing UK, EU and worldwide trade mark and design right registrations and working closely with overseas IP lawyers. Increasingly, clients are assigning representation of their entire registered IP portfolios into Cordelia’s management.

Cordelia also advises on and drafts agreements involving the exploitation of intellectual property rights, in addition to IP matters forming part of wider corporate deals.

She has a hands-on approach and advises individual and business clients from a range of sectors. These include the media, entertainment, and creative industries, with a focus on fashion, art and publishing, health and fitness, communications, and technology, both in the UK and cross-border.

At a previous firm, Cordelia acted for LucasFilm on the high-profile Star Wars copyright infringement case, from its inception through to success at the Supreme Court (Lucasfilm Ltd & Ors v Ainsworth & Anor [2011] UKSC 39). This gave her valuable contentious experience as well as technical acumen in copyright law.

Cordelia’s extensive experience, tenacity and personability, not to mention her ability to achieve the very best for her clients, is recognised in regular, repeat work from clients both big and small.

*Cordelia Payne is a Consultant at Acuity Law working on a self-employed basis*

  • UK, EU and international trade mark filings and prosecutions
  • Brand protection strategy
  • Commercial contracts with an IP focus
  • Licences and assignments of intellectual property rights
  • Intellectual property disputes at the UKIPO, EUIPO, IPEC and High Court
  • Domain name registration and disputes
  • Advising a high-profile alcohol brand in bringing a passing off claim against a competitor, up to and including Court proceedings, which featured an application for an injunction in the High Court. The case resulted in settlement at the stage of disclosure
  • Advising a fashion brand in a design right dispute with a major PLC, which resulted in a favourable settlement offer to our client shortly before us issuing proceedings
  • Acting for REDA Industrial Materials FZE, an international chemical distribution company based in Dubai, in relation to its rapidly increasing brand portfolio. This includes advising in relation to three EU trade mark oppositions at the EUIPO, in addition to a number of trade mark filings on the client’s behalf
  • Acting for world-leading healthcare data organisation Pharmatelligence Limited on the launch of a branded product, LivingstoneIQ. This involved advising in relation to its international launch, including negotiations with another big healthcare company and earlier rightsholder, Sensyne Health, which posed a threat to registration and use in the US. The client secured the right to register and use the brand in the US
  • Advising expanding dentistry business Portman Healthcare Limited in relation to a variety of intellectual property matters, including brand protection, third-party conflicts and IP matters in acquisition agreements
  • Advising an international furniture design and homeware brand on its collaboration with the V&A museum in London for the sale of licensed goods as part of one of the museum’s exhibitions, in addition to setting up a new digital platform to find emerging designers
  • Successfully defending a complaint filed by a competitor at ICANN against a peer-to-peer Bitcoin and Altcoin trading platform for the transfer of a domain name
  • Advising a high-profile chain of fitness studios on international brand protection strategy and making a large number of trade mark filings in the UK, EU, Australia and other territories. The work also included negotiating co-existence agreements in Spain and the US, making appeals to the EUIPO and preparing a strategy to prevent a multimillion dollar US company with a similar brand from entering the UK market
  • Advising an employee experience and rewards platform across a range of IP and brand protection matters, including defending trade mark opposition proceedings brought by eBay Inc
  • Successfully defending a claim for trade mark infringement and passing off brought by the Soho House group in relation to a client’s new restaurant in Soho
  • The Intellectual Property Team is ranked Tier 2 in The Legal 500
  • The Media & Entertainment Team is ranked band 1 by Chambers and Partners
  • The Media & Entertainment Team is ranked Tier 2 in The Legal 500
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