The IPKat Team

Tara Aaron

One of our guest bloggers for the first half of 2012, Tara is a partner in the Nashville, Tennessee, law firm Aaron Sanders. Tara has advised major political campaigns on the use of copyright music, has successfully obtained hijacked domain names for their rightful owners, negotiates service and technology agreements against large telecoms and software providers and also files trade marks. She has also worked full-time in music publishing with an entertainment law firm on Music Row. When not otherwise engaged, she sings and accompanies her Basset hounds on the violin (more details here).

David Brophy

A partner and European Patent Attorney with the Irish firm FRKelly, David Brophy has been working in the profession since 1993 in Dublin. He holds a degree in experimental physics from Trinity College Dublin, and his practice has gradually extended from patent work into the designs and copyright field. His professional work is now divided between patents and designs in roughly equal measures, and he comes to the IPKat team with almost two decades of drafting and prosecution experience, but sadly no professorships (more details here).



Birgit Clark

A member of Baker & McKenzie's London office which she joined in 2011, Birgit is a seasoned blogger and is also a respected mainstay of the MARQUES Class 46 weblog. A Rechtsanwalt, solicitor and trade mark attorney, Birgit holds an LLM from the University of Aberdeen and a Doctorate in Law (Dr. iur.) from the University of Tübingen. A member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice (JIPLP), Birgit also writes extensively in the field of intellectual property law in both English and her native German. Her IP interests include rights of privacy and personality (more details here).

Catherine Lee

Australian Cat-the-Kat, who joined the IPKat in May 2011, works at Osborne Clarke as a solicitor in the Commercial IP and Digital Business teams. She trained at top tier firm Clayton Utz in Sydney and after qualification worked in the IP/IT group at the firm and on secondment at the Australian Copyright Council. Catherine came to the UK as a Commonwealth Scholar to read for a DPhil in copyright law at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford. Since completion of her studies, she has undertaken a broad range of contentious and non-contentious IP and media work, including pupillage at leading media and entertainment law chambers 5 Raymond Buildings and as a night lawyer for The Sun newspaper. Catherine is also a keen cook and wine buff, the latter developed during her time as President of the Oxford University Wine Society and more recently as an Associate Judge at the International Wine Challenge (more details here).

Jeremy Phillips

IP Consultant to London-based solicitors Olswang LLP and Honorary Research Fellow, Intellectual Property Institute, Jeremy is a Professorial Fellow, Queen Mary IP Institute and teaches at the University of Alicante, Spain. A veteran blogger and a founding member of the IPKat team in June 2003, he is heavily involved in IP consultancy work, editing the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice (JIPLP) and the European Trade Mark Reports (ETMR), conference and seminar organising and tackling freelance IP research projects (more details here)


Norman Siebrasse

The first of a number of guest bloggers for the first half of 2012, Professor Norman Siebrasse (University of New Brunswick), who is a distinguished Canadian patent blogger in his own right with Sufficient Description. Norman, who clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada for the Honourable Madam Justice McLachlin, currently teaches IP law, commercial law and remedies. His research focuses on patent law, as well as topics at the intersection of commercial law and IP, including security interests.


Darren Smyth

Patent attorney Darren Smyth is a partner in the UK-based intellectual property practice of EIP.  Another of the team's guest bloggers for the first half of 2012, Darren is a man of many talents, even apart from being a synthetic organic chemist.  He has great experience of the European Patent Office following the many years in which he has had to engage with that office on behalf of clients. He also as an interest in design law. Darren speaks Japanese -- but he writes for this weblog in English.




Annsley Merelle Ward



Better known as the AmeriKat, though not exclusively tied to that tag, Annsley is the baby of the team — but you’d never guess it from her efficient research and powerful writing. An intellectual property litigation associate in the London office of Allen & Overy LLP, she holds law degrees from University College London and the University of Bristol and has a background in science having studied chemical engineering at the University of New Mexico. Annsley has a wide range of interests that span  all aspects of contentious IP, but she also enjoys reporting on legislative reforms, most recently on the proposed European unitary patent proposals. She also acts as an ad hoc adviser to the Victoria and Albert Museum on intellectual property matters (more details here).




Neil J. Wilkof

Of Counsel to Herzog Fox Neeman, Tel-Aviv, and to Dr Eyal Bressler & Co., Ramat Gan, Neil specialises in technology transfer and computer and internet law. He teaches and writes extensively on IP issues, being co-author of the current edition of the standard Sweet & Maxwell work on Trade Mark Licensing and a major contributor to the IP Finance weblog. As readers of his work will know, Neil rarely confines himself to the straitjacket of IP law when economic, philosophical or historical issues can be effectively brought to bear (more details here).



and not forgetting …

The AmeriKat

The AmeriKat is Annsley’s persona when she’s blogging on matters American. In principle the AmeriKat sends one or two weekly “Letter from AmeriKat” missives, though there are times when she will post an entire series of features on the same topic (Bilski was one such instance), and other times when she’s probably shopping …