Services
Intellectual Property
Intangible assets are among the most valuable to companies, regardless of their size or their expansion plans. It is therefore extremely important to have specialized counsel to protect these assets in Ecuador and other countries in the world.
To achieve this, we offer practical and proactive solutions to our clients. Our strategy is based on having an intimate knowledge of the business so as to offer the necessary and adequate legal tools for achieving the desired objectives. We counsel national and foreign clients (through correspondents around the world) to provide quality service in all their intellectual and industrial property rights.
We have the technological resources to enable appropriate surveillance of intangibles both in Ecuador and the Andean Community countries.
Our services
Our services
Our counsel begins with a preventive audit to ensure protection of intangible assets and comply with current regulations. Moreover, we thoroughly examine the client's portfolio of intellectual property rights to protect and increase their assets in this regard.
Competition between companies, the sophistication of product counterfeiting, and the burgeoning informal sector determine the need for strong and appropriate protection of intellectual and innovative creations.
At AVL, the complex litigation and intellectual property teams come together to handle all types of disputes in this area, whether administrative, judicial, or alternative dispute resolution, protecting our clients and defending them against complaints raised.
Guided by the client’s best interest, we pursue development of creative solutions to resolve disputes, providing transparency in our legal opinion, the actions to follow, the grounds, and the possibilities of success in each case, which we handle to fit the client's needs.
We take care of all the steps involved in registering trademarks with the competent authority in Ecuador and around the world. We guide our clients to ensure trademark protection of their distinctive marks and features for identifying products, services, and activities at a national and international level, and in keeping them updated. We offer a distinctive marks surveillance service so that our clients can feel secure in the full protection of their assets.
At our firm, we understand the commercial and economic potential of a client's inventions, so we seek to counsel from a legal and technical perspective on inventions, whether patents, utility models, or industrial designs. Additionally, our network of first-rate correspondents provides the same comprehensive service.
Our firm stays abreast of technological advances in all business areas, and we can therefore offer our clients the best counsel on contracts and technology transfer, always looking after intellectual property rights protection and rooted in a logical and comprehensive strategy for new technologies implementation.
The digital revolution we are going through has led to the urgent need to reinvent ourselves, and companies have changed their business model, turning to electronic commerce and Internet use.
This new type of business requires companies to collect consumer data to process their services and sales, and this entails handling personal data.
At AVL, we counsel our clients to adopt the best data protection and privacy measures for their consumers, keeping constantly up to date on the relevant regulations.
All companies without exception have secrets concerning their products or services that set them apart from other companies. Because of the importance of these secrets and because competitors try to acquire their customer lists and other industrial and commercial secrets —including copying their business model— customers find it necessary and effective to protect this confidential information to maintain their competitive advantage.
At AVL, we develop applicable strategies to protect industrial secrets, undisclosed information storage, contracts, and confidentiality agreements.
Plant varieties are key elements for stakeholders in horticulture, agriculture, and forestry who need to protect these improvements and potentiate their development. At AVL, we provide a comprehensive local and international protection service for plant varieties.
Our firm provides pragmatic and strategic counsel for holders of copyrights and related rights who seek the best rights protection and assistance in matters of rights infringements and limitations, contract negotiations for rights transfer, licenses, observance, and settlement of disputes arising in this intellectual property area.
Success Stories
- In the area of litigation and protection of industrial property rights, our professionals have counseled a major international beverage company regarding consumer protection against unauthorized use of their three-dimensional trademark to identify products not meeting their quality standards or legal parameters. We were able to obtain not only definitive precautionary measures against the offenders, including the withdrawal of containers from the marketplace, but we were also able to win a judgment against this person which carried a substantial and exemplary fine to discourage similar breaches.
- Our Intellectual Property area has successfully consolidated the brand portfolio of an important international pharmaceutical group, succeeding in registering various complex brands and reaching agreements with the company’s competitors to enable the coexistence of marks in the market, with no possibility or risk of confusion by consumers.
