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HGF Ltd is one of Europe’s largest firms of IP specialists. With 55 partners and over 120 specialist IP attorneys and solicitors, the firm is one of only a few in the United Kingdom to offer clients fully integrated IP solutions.
The firm has an ambitious growth strategy and is already one of the leading firms in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe in terms of its national reach, volume of Patent Cooperation Treaty and EU trademark filings and position in major legal directories. The firm’s growth has been secured organically and through a combination of acquisition and strategic lateral hires from both private practice and in-house counsel.
HGF has a proven track record in forging successful long-term relationships with clients across a spectrum of business sectors and technologies. The firm’s focus is on delivering client-specific IP advice from teams of professional attorneys chosen to meet clients’ needs. The firm’s highly experienced attorneys, commitment to client service and geographical profile ensure that it is uniquely placed to attend to high-value and complex IP issues.
Specialist teams
The firm has dedicated teams of experts working across key industry sectors with relevant experience who fully understand their clients’ businesses and appreciate the significance of their brands, innovations and other IP assets.
These teams comprise trademark attorneys, patent attorneys and IP solicitors across 17 offices in the United Kingdom and Europe, including Aberdeen, Amsterdam, Basel, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, London, Manchester, Munich, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, Sheffield, The Hague, Westport and York.
Key industry sectors include retail and fashion, food and drink, pharmaceuticals, automotive, computing and software, energy, medical devices and healthcare.
For each sector, the firm’s specialist trademarks team offers the following services:
- Clearance projects – HGF’s attorneys have sector-specific experience in large-scale international search projects through to single-mark domestic searches, offering clear, commercial advice on availability of marks in each case.
- Filing and prosecution – providing accurate advice on registrability, strategic filing advice and efficiently seeing applications though to registration in order to build strong portfolios that reflect clients’ business needs.
- Portfolio advice and audits – the team has a proven track record in developing strategic and well-balanced strategies for the protection and enforcement of all IP assets (including trademarks and designs) and regularly conducts audits to ensure portfolios remain aligned to the interests of clients’ businesses.
- Portfolio management – as one of the largest trademark filers in Europe and with a bespoke management and budgeting tool, the team has vast experience managing global trademark portfolios.
- Watching services – providing all manner of register, domain and anti-counterfeit watches.
- Oppositions and disputes – whatever the nature or scale of the dispute, HGF’s team of trademark attorneys and solicitors have the expertise to work with clients to achieve the best possible outcome.
- Transactional trademark issues – with decades of experience, the team is ready and prepared to support clients with due diligence, licensing and all other transaction-related work.
- Training – HGF offers bespoke training tailored to clients’ specific needs.
The wider firm offers everything you would expect of a world-class IP firm, including patent and trademark, design rights and copyright advice as well as IP litigation, non-contentious IP law, licensing and contracts, oppositions and appeals, due diligence, freedom-to-operate and IP strategy advice to protect innovations.
Languages
The firm’s spoken languages include German, French, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Twi, Kyrepong, Ga, Portuguese, Mandarin, Russian, Cantonese, Polish, Gaelic, Arabic, Hindi and Bengali.
International
HGF is one of a few firms to have mapped out reciprocity across the globe and have a clear strategy for growing international work, targeting the United States, India, Korea and China with focused activities. HGF has connections with the Asian Patent Attorneys Association, the International Federation of Intellectual Property Attorneys, the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property, the American Intellectual Property Law Association, the Biotechnology Innovation Organisation (BIO), BIO Korea, BIO Japan, BIO-Europe, the International Trademark Association, Managing Intellectual Property, the North East of England Process Industry Cluster, International Drug Discovery Science Technology and the American Bar Association.
