Before entering the patent profession, Adrian enjoyed over five years working in the automotive industry as a Senior Development Engineer for the likes of Jaguar Cars (now Jaguar Land Rover) where he became professionally registered as a Chartered Mechanical Engineer (CEng). After fulfilling an ambition of driving a Land Rover across Europe and Africa from London to Cape Town, Adrian returned to his Yorkshire roots and joined one of the largest pan-European patent and trade mark firms where he became dual-qualified as a Chartered (UK) and a European Patent Attorney and a UPC Representative. In 2012, he joined a smaller practice in York to continue working as a Senior Patent Attorney, before establishing Tandem Patents in 2016.
Adrian enjoys working with a wide variety of clients ranging from individual inventors and start-ups to more established SMEs, large multinational companies and universities. He has many years’ experience supporting in-house counsel with, for example, patent drafting and prosecution work and infringement/validity assessments.
His regular work includes carrying out Intellectual Property (IP) audits to determine what IP is being generated by an individual or company, what IP should be protected and, importantly, why. He prepares and files new patent applications and prosecutes the same either directly at the relevant Patent Offices, or via foreign patent attorneys in all major jurisdictions, until hopefully ultimate grant of a patent. Adrian has much experience advising on validity and infringement matters and has prepared numerous validity and infringement opinions in relation to granted UK and European patents and registered designs. He has attended examination and opposition proceedings at the European Patent Office in The Hague and Munich, and has also prepared and filed a number of successful third party observations against competitor patent applications. Adrian has carried out numerous freedom-to-operate (FTO) exercises to determine the infringement risks and implications of launching a new product or process in a particular territory, and has also undertaken a number of due diligence analyses of IP assets prior to corporate acquisitions.
His first-hand experience of the automotive industry and, in particular, working within a team of professional design and development engineers importantly helps Adrian to efficiently engage with, and fully understand, fellow engineers when discussing engineering and patent-related matters. In turn, this tandem of engineering and legal experience enables Adrian to become a real part of the engineering team he is working with and also to add value to the design/development process itself.
