Peter Livingstone
Director - Company Commercial and Dispute Resolution Departments
Director in our commercial and dispute resolution teams, Peter has particular expertise in the increasingly important areas of intellectual property and IT contracts. He also has considerable experience and understanding of commercial and other types of disputes, how to prevent them from arising and how to resolve them quickly and successfully when they do.
Businesses of all types need to include their intellectual property in their thinking and planning. The proportion of the value of a typical business which is represented by its IP has been growing steadily in recent years and is now over 70%. Not only has the value of its other assets fallen, but the worth of its IP has grown. This will certainly include its market profile and its customer list, and it may well extend to its website, its documentation, its trade secrets and to registered designs and patents. The planning for all of that needs to cover areas such as an assessment of what IP assets the business has, steps to protect and preserve that IP by for example registration, and a policy for the measures to be taken against third parties which infringe the organisation's rights.
Peter has represented clients of all sizes, from the smallest web-based business to national supermarket chains, a Guinness Premiership rugby club, an investment organisation purchasing an complete farm of wind turbines and the bank which was purchased by Virgin Money.
Peter has considerable experience of advising companies as to the strategies they should follow, the steps they should take and the agreements they should put in place in order to maximise the potential of their intellectual property.
He has also worked to support businesses in relation to their sale or purchase of IT of varying types, including software, hardware, a combination of the two and of course now cloud computing.
In dispute resolution for clients, as in all of the work he does, Peter knows that a key goal as far as the client is concerned is arriving at a solution on a sensible, pragmatic and cost-effective basis. This will involve an examination of the nature of the dispute or disagreement, the arguments put forward by the other side and the resources which they can deploy, and their attitude to the dispute. It will include a careful consideration of the client's goals and of their options, and it will necessitate advice to the client regarding what they can expect in terms of cost, timescales and outcomes. That advice starts on day 1 and continues right through the case to its eventual outcome.
His dispute resolution experience includes complex cases before a range of courts, and multi party litigation involving hundreds of individual clients. He is able to assist clients to stop disputes arising, to resolve them on the best and most commercial terms achievable if they do begin, and to take cases to ultimate decision by a court or tribunal where that has to be done.
He has acted in relation to a wide variety of disputes including litigation arising from the sale of an e-commerce company where the purchaser declined to pay the full agreed price and alleged that the business was not as had been represented to him by the seller. He has acted for inventors where the company which bought their patent rights decided to stop paying royalties, and for an import company where the owner of registered design rights alleged that the importer was infringing those rights. He has advised a construction company regarding allegations that it had infringed the unregistered design rights owned by a competitor, and has represented a pharmaceutical company in relation to allegations that it was infringing the trade mark of another business in a way likely to make that trade mark generic and lack distinctiveness in the marketplace.
Away from commercial disputes, Peter has acted on a broad range of litigation cases including agricultural cases and litigation within families, both between former partners and between generations, and he understands the often surprising emotional responses which can be experienced when parties to a dispute know each other very well.
Peter qualified as a solicitor in 1988. He worked for many years for Clarke Willmott, most recently in the litigation and then commercial departments at that firm's Bristol office, taking a key role in the early days of its IP team. He was responsible for the firm's own IT for many years and sat on the management board. He joined Battens in 2009 as a director and head of the company commercial department, and has sat on the company's board and management committee throughout his time here.
Peter takes time out from family life to run and to play tennis. He has also qualified as an Associate of the Royal College of Photography after 5 years' study.
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