Cordelia Payne

Intellectual Property

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 experiences.

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.

Expertise:

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