Deborah Niven

Expertise

Deborah is highly regarded as an experienced intellectual property and information technology lawyer. Deborah’s clients benefit from commercially pragmatic advice surrounding their intellectual property and IT assets. This includes auditing her client’s intellectual property; ensuring her clients are protecting and registering IP where necessary, advising clients on commercialisation of new ideas and inventions, confidentiality, data protection, drafting contracts, assignments and licence agreements and defending those IP/IT rights against copying.

Clients find Deborah’s technical knowledge and can-do attitude enables her to obtain the best solution for her clients.

Deborah Advises

• PLCs to owner managed businesses
• University enterprise centres and University spin out companies
• Technology businesses
• Software developers
• Creative and design businesses
• Entrepreneurs and inventors
• Manufacturers

Experience Highlights

• Advising a company in the automotive industry on copyright issues involved in the development of its software products, in the lead up to sale of the business, assisting in the successful multi million pound sale of the company.

• Drafting a suite of IT agreements and advising a start up business offering a cloud based service for customers in the insurance and legal sectors, including support contracts, privacy policy, website terms and conditions and licensing agreements.

• Advising a manufacturing company on the re-negotiation of a patent and know-how licence arrangement with a supplier in Poland resulting in new developments to the technology being owned by our client.

• Advising on the registration of key trade marks and registered designs for an existing business in the food industry looking to protect its growing brand and packaging.

• Defending a client against allegations of trade mark infringement by Nestle.

Career History

Previous Law Firms

• Hlw Keeble Hawson
• Virtuoso Legal
• Irwin Mitchell

Education

• University of Bristol (Post Graduate Diploma)
• The University of Sheffield (LPC)
• Sheffield Hallam University (LLB)
• Post Graduate Diploma in Intellectual Property Law and Practice, University of Bristol 2005