The scope of protection of a trade mark registration is a key question faced by trade mark practitioners when advising on rebrands. The recent Oatly case [Oatly AB v Glebe Farm Foods Limited [2021] EWHC 2189 (IPEC)] raises some interesting questions in the context of a likelihood of confusion and unfair advantage. Oatly owned a...

On 1 September 2021, Sony’s ‘Vita’ trade mark lost out in genuine use revocation proceedings in the EU General Court (see case T‑561/20). The trade mark Vita had been registered by Sony for a variety of class 9 items, including “data carriers containing programs” and “audio and/or image carriers (not of paper).” Vieta Audio applied...

Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet? 💥 There has been an explosion in the amount of financing options available to software companies over the last few years. No more are the days of just raising VC, growth equity, or pursuing a buyout – new forms of funding such as venture debt, revenue based financing, and Alt VC are giving founders a tremendous amount of flexibility in how they accomplish their goals. Fundscape did the courtesy of

Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet? ☁️ VCs look for immediate and extreme growth in their investments, so the profitability of the companies they work with is the least of their concerns. But striving for sky high growth can be costly, and not just in dollars. Dumping loads of capital into marketing makes it nearly impossible to identify your real cost to acquire customers (CAC), and if your CAC remains high over time, you run the risk of never being able to build a sustainable model. There are, however, some

Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet? 🌎 TAM (total addressable market), SAM (serviceable available market), and SOM (serviceable obtainable market) are the typical tiers used to demonstrate what a company’s market could be. But none of them focus on the near future of your company – TAM’s are generally represented as $1b+, which isn’t going happen in the short term. That’s why Fairbanks Venture Advisors

Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet? 🥤 One of the often misunderstood aspects of term sheets is liquidation preferences. These preferences give VCs the right to receive the funds they have invested before any common shareholders, such as founders, if a liquidation event occurs. That doesn’t just mean in the case of bankruptcy or winding down your company – any sort of transaction in which there is a change of control is considered a liquidation event.

Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet? 🏃‍♂️ People often refer to raising venture capital as “jumping on the VC treadmill” because once you get on it, it’s very hard to get off. Astronomical growth targets require founders to spend all of the funds they raise quickly, putting them in an all out sprint to gain traction so they can raise their next round. David Sacks’ recent post on venture backed SaaS Org Charts gives a flavor of

Welcome back to The SaaS Playbook, a bi-weekly rundown of the top articles, tactics, and thought leadership in B2B SaaS. Not a subscriber yet? 🩺 ARX (one of the first electronic signature businesses) isn’t a classic success story – only four years after being acquired for 100m, their buyer, Cylink, was ready to pull the plug on them. ARX’s team rallied to buy the business back, using a hefty amount of debt which they were able to pay off in a few years, setting them up for a fresh start. Boaz Lantsman, who joined their team after ARX regained control,

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An article appeared on the Lexology legal news service in the past week that riled me a little – not least because it mentions my name and (in my view) misrepresents something that I wrote a few months ago.  For those who may be unfamiliar with Lexology, it is a service that aggregates content from legal and attorney firms, and other service providers, creating a searchable archive and delivering tailored email bulletins to subscribers.  It is free to subscribe and read, but the firms that provide all the content pay handsomely for the privilege of being aggregated and distributed.  In other words, it is not so much a ‘news’ service for readers as it is a marketing service for the contributing firms.  Most of the content is originally published on the firms’ web sites, from which it is automatically picked up (‘ingested’) by Lexology. 

While many of the articles appearing on the Lexology site are useful and informative – e.g. reports of the latest legal developments in various jurisdictions served by the contributing firms – some are pure marketing.  The piece that has so irked me falls, in my opinion, into the latter category.

The article in question is entitled ‘The brain drain: why are senior patent attorneys leaving?’  Authorship is attributed to James & Wells partners Ceri Wells and Adam Luxton.  Wells is one of the firm’s founders, while Luxton recently joined the firm having previously worked for Spruson & Ferguson – a firm owned by listed holding company IPH Limited (ASX:IPH).  Lexology picked the article up from James & Wells’ website, although that was not its first outing – it was originally published as a sponsored article in Australasian Lawyer [PDF 1.04MB]. 

Never let it be said, then, that James & Wells has not extracted maximum value from the piece, which bears all the hallmarks of having been written not by Wells and Luxton themselves, but rather by a marketing professional.  It takes the classic public relations form of ostensibly objective reporting, interspersed with quoted and paraphrased comments from Wells and Luxton in support of the article’s main theses, which are that:

1. there has been an ‘exodus of senior patent attorneys from formerly private firms’ because of ‘corporatisation’, and the acquisition and merger strategies of the listed holding companies IPH Limited and QANTM IP Limited (ASX:QIP);
2. as a result, those firms are losing the benefit of these senior practitioners’ experience, and they are ‘being replaced by younger people with a lot less experience’ who are ‘missing out on the mentorship they need at that point in their career’;
3. this may lead to junior attorneys feeling ‘overworked and stressed’;
4. practitioners in ‘corporatised’ firms may lack the autonomy and discretion to keep clients ‘at the forefront’ and to build strong relationships ‘based on trust and respect’; and
5. established firms now owned within corporate groups are no longer able to guarantee clients that ‘whoever you engaged in that organisation would be able to deliver’.

Overall, the tenor of the article is simply that ‘corporatised firms = bad’ whereas ‘traditional privately held, partnership type models (like James & Wells) = good’.  Perhaps it feels plausible that this might be so, and doubtless there are people around who will attest, anecdotally, to some experience that supports the argument.

I am just not persuaded that it is true, or that having firms going around claiming that it is are doing the Australasian profession any favours.

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