Patent lawyer in Lyon

A patent protects a company’s technology and is therefore a major legal issue. Whether in a partnership, a licence agreement or a dispute, our firm can assist you in securing your rights.

Cabinet Bouchara & Avocats assists companies, in particular those based in Lyon and the Lyon region, with their contractual matters, audits and patent litigation.

Our lawyers take a comprehensive approach to intellectual property law, tailored to the legal and commercial stakes of each company.

Is a patent raising a legal difficulty in a contract, a transaction or a dispute?

Talk to our team in Lyon.

Our patent law services in Lyon

Our lawyers in Lyon handle the legal aspects of patents: audits, contracts, confidentiality, employee inventions and litigation.

Legal audit of patents

Before completing a transaction, it is necessary to check that the patents filed are actually held by the company and that no contract or undertaking restricts their use.

Our lawyers review the titles and applications concerned, their proprietor, the agreements entered into with partners, licensees or co-owners, as well as any existing security interests or restrictions. We identify the points to be regularised and those to be taken into account in order to carry out the audit.

This analysis may take place in the context of an acquisition, a fundraising round, a restructuring, an industrial partnership or a broader intellectual property audit.

Framing an R&D collaboration or the exploitation of a patent

Where a technology is developed or exploited by several parties, difficulties often arise when the contract does not sufficiently specify who owns the results, who may use them and what happens to future improvements.

We draft and negotiate the agreements required by our clients’ projects: research and development contracts, patent licences and assignments, co-ownership rules, technology transfer agreements or know-how agreements (French IP Code, art. L.613-8 and L.613-29 to L.613-32).

Our role is to translate the commercial agreement into legal rules that are precise enough as to each party’s rights, any exclusivity, the territories concerned, the financial terms, sub-licences and the end of the collaboration.

Securing exchanges of technical information

A company may need to present a technology to an investor, an industrial partner, a service provider or a potential acquirer before a final agreement is signed.

Our lawyers draft or review the confidentiality agreements governing these discussions. They determine which information may be disclosed, to whom, for what purpose and for how long.

The aim is also to control the circulation of know-how and trade-secret information during the negotiations and after any breakdown in discussions (French Commercial Code, art. L.151-1).

Preventing or handling a patent dispute

A formal notice, a disagreement with a licensee or the discovery of a product likely to infringe a patent all call for an analysis of the situation. Where infringement is at stake, the consequences for the company’s business may be significant: continued marketing, product withdrawal, negotiation of a licence or the launch of court proceedings.

Whether acting for the claimant or the defendant, our lawyers analyse the titles relied upon, the products or processes concerned, the existing contracts and the available evidence. They then assist the company in its exchanges with the opposing party, in seeking an amicable solution or in infringement proceedings before the competent courts.

Depending on the circumstances, the facts may also raise separate questions of unfair competition, in particular where wrongful commercial conduct accompanies the alleged infringement of intellectual property rights.

Organising rights over inventions made by your employees

Where an invention is made by an employee, that employee will be named as inventor and a number of rules follow from this.

We assist employers in handling invention declarations, their classification, the allocation of rights and questions relating to the inventor’s remuneration. We also act where a disagreement arises with the employee, including in exchanges or proceedings before the French National Commission for Employee Inventions.

Examples of matters handled

Our team acts for companies on authorisations to exploit patents entrusted to third parties, but also where the ownership, exploitation or defence of a patent raises a legal difficulty.

Here are several examples of situations in which the firm has acted.

Patent co-ownership to be clarified between industrial partners

A company in the Lyon region approached us as an industrial partnership was evolving. The terms governing the exploitation of a patent developed with their partner had not been sufficiently formalised.

Our team reviewed the existing agreements, analysed each party’s rights and identified the elements likely to complicate the continuation of the project. We then assisted the partners in formalising a new contractual framework clarifying the exploitation of the patent.

A patent licence no longer suited to international expansion

A distribution company wished to obtain authorisation to exploit a technology in new markets, whereas its licence agreement had been concluded for France only, several years earlier.

We analysed the scope of the rights and negotiated the extension of the territories. Our work then focused on renegotiating the provisions required for the project’s international development, with rights of first refusal over the countries where expansion was not immediate.

Rights to be regularised before the acquisition of a technology company

In an acquisition project, our client needed to be sure that the patents presented as key assets of the target company were in fact owned and available for the planned business.

The audit revealed several points to be clarified in the chain of title and in the patent grant processes in the various countries. We alerted the acquirer to the difficulties and to how they could be resolved, so that the acquisition could proceed on entirely clear and readable terms.

Sensitive technical exchanges to be secured before an R&D partnership

A partnership project required technical information and know-how to be disclosed even before the final agreement was signed.

Cabinet Bouchara & Avocats acted to frame the conditions for disclosing and using this information, as well as its return or destruction should the discussions fail. The aim was to allow the teams to continue negotiating without strategic information circulating outside any contractual confidentiality framework.

A commercial dispute over the use of confidential information

After a collaboration broke down, one of our clients found that some of the information disclosed during the negotiations was still being used by its former partner.

Our team analysed the confidentiality undertakings, the exchanges between the parties and the evidence establishing the disputed use. We assisted the client with the pre-litigation steps and then with the handling of the dispute before the Lyon Economic Activities Court. Here we had to carry out seizure operations under article 145 of the French Code of Civil Procedure before bringing proceedings on the merits.

A claim relating to an invention made by an employee

A company approached us following a claim by an employee who had taken part in developing an invention. The disagreement concerned the employee’s rights and financial reward.

Our team examined the employee’s duties, the circumstances in which the work had been carried out and the existing internal documents, then assisted the company in handling the claim and in its exchanges with the inventor.

Patent law firm in Lyon

Cabinet Bouchara & Avocats has an office in Saint-Didier-au-Mont-d’Or, in the Lyon metropolitan area, where we meet companies, executives and legal departments from Lyon and the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region.

Patent issues regularly form part of a broader set of intellectual property rights. An innovation may also involve a trade mark, software, a design or model, know-how or works protected by copyright.

The firm coordinates these various issues as part of our specialisation in industrial property law in Lyon.