ASPIDES PATENT & TRADEMARKS: PROTECTING YOUR ASSETS

Aspides is ancient greek for “Shield.” If there’s one detail you can’t afford to overlook in running a long-term successful business, it’s protecting your assets effectively.

We are not talking about your equipment, vehicles, or even equity, we are talking about protecting your ideas.

Aspides Patent & Trademark Attorneys, George Hatzis and Jaime Massang have been in the game for over 2 decades.

Their trademark, patent and design attorney and commercial lawyer’s goal is to help local businesses of all shapes and sizes be protected against IP infringement.

When kicking off a new business, an energetic new owner goes to the accountant or solicitor to get advice on the contracts and the entity set up and general asset planning and tax planning.

Then fast forward a few years, when the owner wants to sell and get some of their hard earned capital back, they find that most of their goodwill is built up around them (personal goodwill) and or usually with a business name, however with a trademark, they have secured the brand of the business Australia-wide. This is attractive to a buyer who is then able to take the business forward and grow further - that is far more valuable. “We have seen a rise in self-filing, but this has introduced a lot of problems because we are having to unravel those issues. In today’s world, it has been made easier to get online and register your trademark, patent or design but you still need to do the preparatory steps and investigations which are lacking when someone acts for themselves,” George told Bottom Line magazine.

George has over thirty-five years experience as a solicitor and Jaime has been a registered Patent and Trade Mark Attorney for twenty years, so, between the two of them, there is more than a half a century of experience where they compliment the other’s skills and attributes.

George and Jaime are driven to provide the best service to all their clients, while still maintaining their promise to go above and beyond to achieve that end.

“For one client, we managed to obtain over twenty granted Patents under the Patent Cooperation treaty in relevant countries of interest. This was a great outcome,” George said.

“A client recently saw us about a dispute he had been involved in with a major international public company who came down hard on them, threatening action involving an abuse of the company’s registered name,” he said.

“Another client saw us after registering multiple domains and business names only to find out when they saw us that the Trademark was already taken and registered in Australia. These are the sorts of situations we are trained to help with.”

Aspides audits your company or brand’s goods or services and tailors their advice and application to your business. Often businesses with innovative ideas or services struggle to find IP services that adapt to their smaller scale startup model. It’s important to find an effective approach to protecting your business’s intellectual property, which is not often top of mind for company owners. Ensuring the correct IP protections are in place is a vital step in creating and maintaining a successful business. Avoiding the pitfalls in the first place is the best way to protect your business.

“Even a small outlay by a client to investigate and do preliminary searches goes a long way towards certainty for the client. Our fees start at $330, which is favourable to the alternative and is rolled into and incorporated into the application fee for that client, so they really get the best of both worlds,” George said.