Sara Ashby

Partner Head of Intellectual Property @Wiggin

London, GB

With over 25 years’ experience, Sara is a specialist intellectual property litigator, with a broad practice covering disputes and strategy across all IP rights including patents across a wide range of technical fields, designs and trade mark disputes and portfolio work, and copyright. She has particular experience in parallel imports and designs and, having started life as a general commercial litigator, is particularly adept at dealing with contractual matters and ‘non-standard’ IP disputes. Sara litigates in the High Court, Patents Court, the Shorter Trial Scheme and the IPEC (the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court), the Registries (the UK IPO and EUIPO) and the appellate courts, and has taken cases to Europe’s highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) as well as coordinating with parallel litigation in other jurisdictions. Sara is President of AIPPI UK (AIPPI is the leading non-government international organisation for research into, and formulation of policy for, the law relating to the protection of intellectual property) and wearing that \'hat\', she is on the UK Government\'s Expert Trade Advisory Group for Intellectual Property. She is heavily involved in the Oxford University Post Graduate Diploma in Intellectual Property Law and Practice, lecturing on litigation, tutoring and examining on designs and copyright, and sitting on the Diploma Management Committee for the course. She is interested in both law and procedural reform, and was an assessor to Lord Justice Jackson in relation to his recent report on fixed and capped recoverable legal costs.She writes regularly on intellectual property law, contributing chapters to Sweet & Maxwell\'s EU Trade Mark Handbook and Community Designs Handbook, Wolter Kluwer\'s publication on Design Rights, and publishing articles in leading IP journals, including the Journal for Intellectual Property Law and Practice (JILIP) and EIPR (European Intellectual Property Review).