Scott Harrison

Scott is an IP director in the firm’s tech and engineering practice groups. He drafts, files and prosecutes patent applications in the UK and Europe.

Scott is well versed at managing large patent families, having worked on hundreds of US, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Australian patent applications during his career. In addition, he has filed and managed patent applications in some less common jurisdictions, including for example Vietnam, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

He has considerable experience of crafting offensive and defensive patent strategies for a wide range of clients, from multinationals to SMEs and start-up businesses. High quality patents that Scott has obtained, after mapping their claims onto competitor products, have been used in multimillion pound licensing programs. Scott has obtained patents that have been used by a start-up client to obtain investment of over £1 million. He has also helped a number of UK companies develop patent strategies to obtain significant tax relief on their products through use of the Patent Box, reducing their Corporation Tax burden by around half to approximately 10%.

Scott particularly enjoys oral advocacy and regularly appears at the European Patent Office in both examination and opposition proceedings. Scott has successfully defended patents that he has drafted and prosecuted at the European Patent Office and revoked those owned by competitors of clients.

His practice encompasses a number of fields in the tech and engineering sectors. On the tech side, he has drafted, prosecuted and advised on patent applications in a wide variety of fields including telecommunications, computer architecture, image processing, computer security, artificial intelligence and blockchain. In engineering, Scott has worked with inventions relating, for example, to aerospace technology, armoured vehicles, composite materials, rocketry, lighting and door and window hardware.

Scott travels frequently to the US and regularly attends conferences held by the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) and the Intellectual Property Owners (IPO) Association. He sits on the Corporate IP Management Committee of the IPO Association.

Before entering the profession, Scott graduated with a first class degree in physics from Imperial College London. He spent his third year studying and researching nuclear physics and optics at La Universidad de Cantabria in Spain. Scott joined Swindell & Pearson in 2003 and became an IP director in 2011.

Outside work, Scott loves travelling to new countries and meeting new people. He also enjoys playing sport and can often be found at Molineux, home to Wolverhampton Wanderers FC, at the weekend.

Cheslyn Hay High School, Imperial College London; MSci physics with a year in Europe, 2003 (1st class).