Burness adds to IP team
Scottish firm Burness added a new partner — Colin Hulme — to the contentious side of its IP practice. [Herald].
From the story, Burness Chairman Philip Rodney mentions:
Colin and I developed a ground-breaking database that is capable of marshalling enormous amounts of information for big commercial cases.
Or at least I had the idea, and Colin put it into practice.
I can’t help but wonder about the details of the database, and how it gets used in practice. Big commercial disputes, especially patent disputes, can involve literally warehouses of information (at least in the US, and I can’t imagine that it’s too different over here). When glancing through legal employment section in the US, one can always see adverts for contract attorney work just doing document review in the discover phase of these cases.
Maybe if it is a really useful tool, they could leverage their own IP? Of course, you wouldn’t want to give the competition a leg up…
