By Karen Peattie
A SCOTS trademark and intellectual property company has made its fourth acquisition in two years as it further strengthens its position as a leading player in the European IP protection sector.
Glasgow-based Murgitroyd has acquired the UK intellectual property business TLIP, founded in 2014 and employing 14 people in Cambridge, Leeds and Dublin, for an undisclosed sum.
Its Leeds and Dublin staff will relocate to Murgitroyd’s existing offices in these cities, while the Cambridge office will provide a new location for the expanded Murgitroyd group to service clients located in one of the UK’s leading innovation hubs.
All employees will transfer over to Murgitroyd, taking the company’s headcount to over 470.
Murgitroyd’s chief executive Gordon Stark described TLIP as a “business with strong links within the growing UK-based technology and biotechnology sectors which, as we saw during the pandemic, are at the cutting edge of innovation”.
Mr Stark added: “We are passionate about helping clients to protect and realise value from their intellectual property and the acquisition of TLIP further enhances our ability to deliver this.”
In January, he told The Herald that Murgitroyd’s plans “involve a combination of both organic growth and acquisitive growth” but noted: “We’re starting to see consolidation in the intellectual property adviser market.”
TLIP’s managing director Dr Alex Turnbull said the firm’s growth had seen it “reach the point where in order to continue to develop our client offering, scale becomes increasingly important”.
“Murgitroyd’s client-focused approach, coupled with its breadth of capacity and capability, means that we can offer our clients an even more comprehensive service that puts IP protection at the heart of their business strategies,” he noted.
Murgitroyd, established by the late Ian Murgitroyd in 1975, was acquired by London-based Sovereign Capital Partners in December 2019 in a deal that valued the business at around £65 million. It had been listed on the London Stock Exchange since 2001 and now has 19 offices in Europe, four client liaison offices in the US, one in China and an office handling patent searching in Nicaragua.
It acquired Glasgow-based Creation IP in April and, in 2021, UK-based UDL Intellectual Property and Irish firm Hanna Moore + Curley.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here