Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

Key definition

Intellectual property definition

What does Intellectual property mean? Intellectual property describes intangible legal rights in creative, technical and branding outputs used and enforced in commercial practice, often abbreviated to IP or IPR. In the UK and Ireland the term is descriptive rather than a single statutory definition; discrete rights arise under specific regimes, typically including copyright, patents, trade marks, registered and unregistered designs, database right, trade secrets and confidential information, and the common law tort of passing off. These rights are territorial, generally time‑limited (trade secrets/confidential information can subsist indefinitely if secrecy is maintained), and confer exclusive rights that can be licensed, assigned, charged as security and...

Privilege in intellectual property: legal advice, litigation, disclosure and without prejudice; protections for patent and trade mark attorneys—guidance for England and Wales

Published by a LexisNexis IP expert

Practice notes

Privilege—the basic principles

This Practice Note sets out several of the issues that general privilege principles create for IP practitioners, together with specific statutory IP privilege provisions to keep in view. For broader guidance on privilege as a whole, see: Privilege and without prejudice communications—overview. Privilege exists because a client and a lawyer need to communicate frankly about protecting the client’s interests, without those conversations being disclosable to an opposing party or to the court.

Although the following are not the only species of privilege, the two principal forms to focus on in the IP sphere are ‘legal advice privilege’ and ‘litigation privilege’. The rules governing each, as developed through case law, can operate with very different practical effects, and their consequences may diverge considerably. These two forms are sometimes grouped together as ‘legal professional privilege’, yet that phrasing is confusingly close to ‘legal advice privilege’ and will therefore not be used again in this note. Appreciating the differences between legal advice privilege and litigation privilege is of practical importance. The particular characteristics of any real life situation will determine which variety of privilege can be relied upon...

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Web page updated on 21/05/2026

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