Intelligent Energy Law
Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP offers a multi-disciplinary approach to advising our energy clients, particularly when it comes to their investments in technology. Our primary goal is to secure the maximum competitive advantage for our clients through the effective exploitation and protection of their assets.
Understanding the Issues
Our firm is on the forefront of addressing the legal issues relating to the increasingly complex technologies used by international energy companies. We call this Intelligent Energy® Law.
We have worked with companies in the energy industry since 1902, expanding our reach in the United States, to Europe, to the Middle East and to the Asia-Pacific. We apply our deep and rich experience with the energy industry and with the legal challenges posed by deploying advanced technologies to anticipate and resolve the legal and contractual issues confronting our energy clients as they develop, acquire and use such technologies in the exploration, appraisal, development, production, refining and transportation of energy resources.
We are focused on the leading edge legal and technology developments. We also assist our clients as they navigate legal and contractual issues associated with data and information harvesting, acquisition, analysis and use—as well as the vexing data security problems that technological advances enable.
We can offer industry-focused guidance on cutting-edge technology legal issues arising with respect to:
How We Can Help
Our energy sector work includes:
Leading Your Transactions
As energy technology continues to evolve, we help our clients fashion legal strategies to address new market dynamics and techniques for transacting as to intellectual property, information, and technology assets.
We also help our energy clients evaluate their approaches in light of the new energy intellectual property/technology value chain and create comprehensive strategies for extracting value from energy intellectual property and international market collaborations, ventures and transactions. Our teams work with our clients throughout their transactions, including the initial strategic development, advising on due diligence issues when entering energy transactions, negotiating and documenting transactions, and developing and implementing transaction exit strategies appropriate to the project and location.
Protecting Your Assets
To manage our clients’ intellectual assets, we have a dedicated team of intellectual property and technology transactions lawyers experienced in the energy industry. We routinely help clients devise strategies to safeguard and maximize their investments in technology throughout each step of the intellectual asset life cycle.
Creation – Securing intellectual property rights across multiple jurisdictions, through clearly structured and documented assignments, ownership agreements and licensing terms.
Acquisition – Crafting assignments, license agreements and targeted acquisition strategies informed by a realistic assessment of intellectual property gaps and vulnerabilities.
Protection – Assessing and securing the most optimal intellectual property protection available to preserve intellectual asset values worldwide through patent prosecution, trademark and copyright registration and drafting and enforcing trade secret arrangements.
Commercialization – Pursuing economic realization of intellectual assets through carefully structured transactions and agreements.
Enforcement and Defense
We help clients implement strategies to establish and secure intellectual property rights, allowing us to vigorously enforce our clients’ intellectual property rights should the need arise. We also assist our clients in defending against intellectual property claims by other, including through new administrative procedures that allow patent challenges to be made at the US Patent and Trademark Office.
We are skilled in litigation involving energy technology, including: