Our attorneys are specialised in all of the relevant technology areas, allowing us to take a tailored, multi-disciplinary team approach to providing solutions for our clients.
Our focus is on providing a team-based approach to solving our clients’ problems in the areas of agricultural technology. This is particularly valuable where the relevant commercialisation arises from a convergence of different technology disciplines, and in these circumstances, we tailor our client solution by hand-picking attorneys for a given matter who have the relevant deep technical expertise.
AgTech
Understanding how patents can be used to protect digital agriculture and other AgTech inventions will be critical for successful players in this industry sector, particularly as many of the inventions where patents may play a role relate to the shift in the traditional mechanical agricultural technologies towards electronics, CII (computer implemented inventions) and AI inventions.
AgTech — Bio Tech and Chemical Sciences
As a country where agriculture remains one of the most important industries, this means that multinational companies develop extensive patent portfolios. And we have the expertise to not only manage and defend these portfolios, but to ensure that each application works with the others to create a single, commercial picture.
Technology focus
Our technical range of expertise in the AgTech field includes:
- Software, electronics and telecommunications (including IOT systems)
- Remote sensing (including drone technology), data and image processing and analysis
- Enhanced mechanisation and automation, including robotics and autonomous farming
- Smart farming/Controlled environment farming – indoor, urban and vertical farming, hydroponics
- Land, crop, livestock and asset management
- Aquaculture
- eCommerce in the agriculture chain, including AgriFintech, Agri-Insurance
Technology focus
Our technical range of expertise includes:
- Fertilizers
- Pesticides, fungicides and herbicides
- Resistance genes
- Breeding values
- Genotyping
- Plant and animal varieties
- Carbon and nitrogen fixation
Our expertise in action
At FPA we are experts in all areas of agriscience, including in the ground-breaking area of digital agriculture. We are experts at navigating the particular difficulties that can often be met in patenting inventions in the software and business method domains, and also at handling technology at the fascinating interface between biotechnology and engineering, exactly where AgTech inventions often lie.
We represent many clients across the AgTech industry, both local and overseas R&D organisations and companies, helping those organisations secure meaningful IP rights to support growth and to monetise their intellectual capital. This includes advising various Australian start-ups in this industry sector, helping them in the process of de-risking to bring their innovations to market and adding value in their intellectual capital.
For example, our clients include companies innovating in the areas of:
- drone and drone control systems for agricultural use (such as remote sensing and crop spraying)
- farming robots able to follow complex operating instructions for crop tending (including planting, weeding and applying treatments)
- systems for analysing performance of agricultural assets, allowing growers to plan agricultural input based on predictions of analysed models, in order to achieve desired plant performance
Our expertise in action
Our clients include a leading multinational agricultural company and number of Australian agricultural R&D corporations and universities.
We advise various Australian start-ups in the agricultural and AgTech sector, helping them in the process of de-risking to bring their innovations to market and adding value in their intellectual capital.
We represent a multinational agricultural client, and a number of companies focused on technologies that have been spun out from them.In addition to managing the prosecution of their patent portfolio in Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia, we represent our client in Australian and New Zealand opposition proceedings and provide validity and infringement assessments in these jurisdictions. We provide a team-based approach drawing on chemical and genetic expertise, and we take a holistic perspective on product protection, taking account of all relevant patents and patent applications of the client.
We successfully defended an important patent in the field of animal genetics before the Australian Patent Office, and assisted with the successful defence of it before the Federal Court of Australia.
We also act for an Australian research corporation where we undertake regular freedom to operate assessment and monitor, advise on, and manage patent infringement risk. Our work is critical to Australia’s largest national breeding program. A feature of our work has been our innovative approach to building a database that defines the relevant patent landscape.
