Personal branding: an IP lawyer on blogging, LinkedIn and differentiating yourself

Working in intellectual property can make me a very annoying friend. I’m constantly pointing at stuff that was the subject of an IP decision, to the point where my friends will say, “You've told me this story before”. Whether it is a chocolate bunny, a red-soled shoe or the colour used on a product – there is often an IP story to be told.

There are certain supermarkets that are notorious for selling heavily-inspired products, that are associated with other brands. Recent cases have focused on a light up gin bottle from M&S and Thatchers cloudy lemon cider. So, sometimes even going grocery shopping can be bad for your blood pressure if you’re an IP lawyer!

I still have a little bit of ‘patent love’ in my soul, even though I tend to work on 'soft IP' disputes in relation to branding now. We go to a festive light trail in the winter – they use these things called ‘intermediate bulk containers’ as the base for temporary tables. And every year, I’ll say, “Oh, did you know there was a patent case about those?”.

I qualified in the financial crisis – I didn't get a job on qualification like many, many others at the time. I was doing my training contract 2008 to 2010 and qualification was very competitive. I think that made me much more aware of how important it was to differentiate yourself.

Image: Rosie with fellow graduate Chris, graduating from the University of Nottingham with a degree in English.

I’ve been blogging since I was a trainee. A lot of my evenings and weekends were spent doing it. If you're going to read a case, why not write about it as well? It becomes a virtuous circle. I want to stay up-to-date and use my knowledge. We've got such amazing digital tools – it doesn't have to be difficult to be out there communicating with people.

I've never said no to opportunities. I think they can snowball. The more people see you, the more they think, “Maybe Rosie would be good for this bit of content”. Then you're in front of a new group of people, who could say “we’d love to have you on our podcast”. And then you're in front of even more new people.

When I became more active on LinkedIn, I had a few people leave rude comments on my posts. That can be crushing to somebody who's starting out. The five or so occasions when that’s happened are still memorable because it can feel a bit like someone in a town square pointing at you.

But I’ve also had great conversations with people because of my posts. A blog reader or LinkedIn follower might not necessarily become a client, but I may have helped someone to become aware of a potential problem. Or I’ll have helped them understand that a relatively straightforward thing, like filing a trade mark early on, could save them a lot of issues down the line.

In IP, you’re working with creatives and innovators. These are people who have found completely new ways of solving problems. They have an unusual way of looking at the world. Just over ten years ago, I worked on a patent dispute for Nintendo in relation to the games in Wii Fit, as played on the Wii and Wii U. As part of the case, I got to go to their head office in Kyoto, Japan, which was a great honour and an incredible experience. It was a real privilege to be taught about the origins of 3D computer graphics and how the game development process has evolved.

It's so fun to speak to the people involved in making things. When I work on fashion cases, I get to see the physical objects and understand how a designer came to make certain choices. It's all a balance between getting a fit that works for people, using materials that are good quality but not super expensive, thinking about a manufacturing perspective, aesthetics and so on.

As lawyers, we get this privileged – in both senses – insight into the business. I love learning about how different industries operate, and also how companies in the same sector can approach similar problems, like recording the product development process, in such different ways.

For me, IP comes back to whether you want to reward creativity. Nobody wants things to be ridiculously expensive, but there is a cost to doing something well and to using human innovation. At the same time, you don't want to prevent people from being able to build on other people’s creative works. It's getting that balance right.

In IP, there’s never a dull moment. I like being kept on my toes. And I suppose I like arguing if I'm honest about it, so being an IP litigator is the perfect career for me!

Image: Rosie on her first day at her firm, Howard Kennedy LLP.

In the past, there was a tendency for some people to make the law feel inaccessible. That’s a weird way of looking at things. You want people to understand the law so they can make the right decisions for themselves and their business. The reality is that most people – even lawyers – are so busy they are not going to read a 25,000-word article on a legal update. Helping to break down the key points is useful for everyone.

When I first conceived of my fashion law book, almost a decade ago, I felt that a lot of the European-focused content wasn’t as user-friendly as it could be. This gave me the opportunity to create something accessible and relatively easy to read.

This was the principle I took with my blog, and book, European Fashion Law: A practical guide from start-up to global success. There are plenty of academic texts out there, both about fashion and about the specific issues that I covered, but they're not read by the general public. In reality my book is mostly read by law students. But I wanted to make sure that anybody, particularly somebody who was starting a fashion business, could pick it up.

I want to help people get the right legal information from the start so they can reduce the risk of litigation down the line. There are steps that creative businesses can easily take at an early stage, such as registering trade marks and designs, staying the right side of advertising law, having clear contracts in place, and having basic website terms and privacy policies. If you’re interested in learning about this, you can pre-order the second edition of my book, published by Edward Elgar Publishing, which comes out in August 2025.

Sometimes lawyers will impose their way of ordering their business on a structure – whether that’s for a website or a book. I wanted to use a structure that was more in line with how a business evolves in real life. For a business-owner, the thought process is likely to be, “I'm at the start, I've got a new product. What should I be doing?”