Expertise
Jonathan specialises in intellectual property law including copyright, trade marks, databases, designs, domain names and confidential information; information technology law, including the licensing of software; commercial law including e-commerce law; data protection law and UK and EU competition law, including in particular anti-competitive agreements and abuses of dominance.
Recent Experience
- Making English legal history by winning the first-ever appeal against a decision of the Company Names Tribunal.
- Advising on the valuation of brand names in a high-profile celebrity divorce.
- Successfully defending a household-name client from regulatory accusations that it had engaged in anti-competitive practices.
- Advising on the head contract and sub-contracts required for the outsourcing to a client of a major Ministry of Defence project.
- Advising a client on a major international data protection compliance project involving more than 30 countries on which a US $2b hive-off depended.
Career History
Jonathan joined Wedlake Bell in 1987, having qualified as a solicitor at a firm in Lincoln’s Inn in 1979, and served as a partner there for 31 years, specializing in IP, IT, commercial and competition law; he is now a consultant with the firm.
Jonathan read Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford, and his degrees include a BA (Hons) and MA in Medieval History and Law from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in Intellectual Property Law from Roehampton University, his thesis having been on the subject of the impact of the internet on UK intellectual property jurisprudence.
Jonathan holds an Honorary Fellowship at the Association of Fellows and Legal Scholars of the Centre for International Legal Studies, sits on the High Technology Committee of the Licensing Executives Society International (one of the world’s largest IP organisations), is a member of the speaker panel of The Society for Computers and Law and of the E-Commerce Law Reports Journal editorial board, and has recently been appointed to a Visiting Lectureship at the University of Bournemouth’s Department of Law. He is a past Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a former director of The City of Westminster and Holborn Law Society, and a member of the Intellectual Property Lawyers’ Organisation, the Society for Computers and Law, the Licensing Executives’ Society, the Law Society’s Competition Section, the British Spanish Law Association, and the Spanish Chamber of Commerce.
Jonathan speaks Spanish (fluent), Italian and French.
Publications and Lectures
Jonathan has authored, co-authored, edited and/or co-edited nine books (including serving as the co-editor and one of the two principal authors of A User’s Guide to Copyright (Bloomsbury Professional, Seventh Edition) and writing The Internet and Intellectual Property (Monitor Press, Second Edition); he has written well over a hundred articles and monographs; and he has delivered some 150 law lectures around the world, including having given an annual lecture on copyright law at the University of Cambridge for ten successive years.
He is also a Member of LexisPSL’s Case Analysis Expert Panels.