Client Testimonials
"We have always found The Waterfront Partnership to offer excellent advice. They have a specialist understanding of IT intellectual property law, which we required to defend a complex copyright dispute. Waterfront were able to fight off the threat of legal action we faced and we now retain the copyright in the software we developed.
We now use Waterfront for all legal advice in our new venture http://www.landorproperty.com and have always found them to work very quickly and provide a very cost effective solution. They provide a very friendly service that is quite unique compared to the larger legal firms."
Iain Hughes, Managing Director, Destra Software Ltd
Confidentiality
Keeping information confidential helps to prevent your competitors from becoming aware of your new ideas and getting to the market place ahead of you.
Further, certain intellectual property rights are destroyed if confidentiality is not preserved. For example, if your business is research intensive, and you freely exhibit a new idea or way of doing something at a trade show, you will no longer be able to apply for patents in respect of that new idea. So keeping information confidential, at least until a new idea has been commercially and legally evaluated for patentability is essential.
Accordingly, you should always educate your employees to keep everything confidential and you should never retain independent consultants without first asking them to sign a written consultancy agreement, which includes confidentiality provisions.
In the event that you become aware of a breach of confidential information, you should seek legal advice as soon as possible. The most important thing is to stop the confidential information being passed on to third parties, and the only way to do this is to make an urgent application to the Court.