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Tom Carver is a partner in CMS’s “Band-One” ranked IP team – one of the largest dedicated IP teams of any law firm. Tom is comfortable advising on a broad range of contentious and non-contentious issues in intellectual property, having spent 20 years working in a variety of IP roles. He was Chief Representative Officer for a large multinational law firm’s office in China, head of litigation in a Band 1 ranked London patent and trade mark filing firm, and head of intellectual property at a boutique corporate firm in Oxford.
Tom’s lead skill is contentious patent work and in that area he has worked on cases involving technologies from anti-sense DNA technology to combinatorial weighing machines, and from video-on-demand systems to mosquito traps. He has advised on interim injunctions, Norwich Pharmacal orders and threats provisions as well as areas such as second medical use claims, Supplementary Protection Certificates and ‘bread and butter’ validity and infringement issues.
Many of the matters in which he has been involved have an international aspect and Tom has experience in co-ordinating and managing litigation in multiple jurisdictions, as well as serving High Court claims in jurisdictions as diverse as India and Argentina.
Tom lived in China for three years, where he managed intellectual property enforcement for Western clients. He is named as an expert by the China IPR SME Helpdesk and his experience includes patent (design, utility and invention), trade secret, trade mark and copyright litigation as well as non-judicial IPR enforcement at trade fairs, online and by Customs seizures against companies in provinces across China. He was invited to present to the Intellectual Property Tribunal of the Supreme People’s Court of China together with Mr Justice Birss (as he was then) on the topic of interim injunctions.
He is listed as a Patent Star and a Trade Mark Star in the Managing Intellectual Property (MIP) IP Stars Handbook, and is recommended by IAM Patent 1000. He sits on the Advisory Council for the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London, and the editorial board for Landslide (the American Bar Association IP Section’s magazine).
On a personal note, before joining CMS, Tom spent a year sailing from France to Tangiers and back with his family (children aged 7 and 8 at the time), while working remotely from his boat.