Australian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that apply to register their IP are 16 percent more likely to experience high employment growth rates than SMEs that don’t, IP Australia’s most recent annual report said. The Australian IP Report 2025 said that, for startups, investors regularly price IP into company value, increasing valuation by some 20 percent. 

“The IP Report data also indicates that registering your business brands as trademarks promotes real business expansion and investment in innovation,” says Georgina Hey, a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright in Sydney, writing on the firm’s website. “Trade mark filings were found to be a strong indicator of sustained innovation and competition, with the Report indicating that businesses that register their trademarks employ 7 percent more people and spend 5 percent more on R&D.https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en/knowledge/publications/33cee72a/the-australian-ip-report-2025-staying-ahead-of-the-pack They also lower the expense of introducing and marketing new products by reducing costs associated with consumer searches.”  

On the patent side, the report noted that pharmaceuticals and biotechnology remain key to the market and are projected to deliver sustained growth, with industry revenue forecast to climb nearly 4 percent annually to 2030. “In 2024, although global patent filings across pharmaceutical and health technology declined overall by 3.3 percent, biotechnology patent filings grew by 4.7 percent in 2024 with strong contributions from Australia (+31.7 percent),” Hey wrote.  

IP Australia has announced plans to reform Australia’s intellectual property system. In March 2026, the IP office issued a consultation paper seeking submissions on its proposed reforms. The consultation paper was developed with the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), the government body which oversees the New Zealand Intellectual Property Office (IPONZ).  

Proposals include expanding the definition of “exclusive licensees” for patents to allow “partial” exclusive licensees to bring infringement proceedings; shortening the opposition process in respect to pharmaceutical patent extensions of term; shifting to a U.S.-style response-based deadline system for both patents and trademarks rather than Australia’s current “time to acceptance” deadline system, which gives applicants a fixed period to secure acceptance, regardless of how many reports and responses are filed; and allowing the commissioner to award costs in trademark oppositions above those outlined in the schedule. 

Submissions in response to the consultation paper were due April 2, 2026. 

With a bright outlook for intellectual property in Australia, IP lawyers should be in high demand in coming years. To learn what clients are looking for in their IP lawyers, we turned to IP professionals in the region in order to understand better what clients need today. Asia IP asked regional professionals – mostly in-house counsel and corporate legal managers – what they were looking for from their legal service providers. From their answers, we have compiled our list of Australia’s IP Experts, those lawyers who understand just what their clients need and are able to provide them with the best practical advice.  

It comes as no surprise that some of Australia’s largest firms dominate our list of IP Experts: Ashurst (Anita Cade, Stuart D’Aloisio, Lisa Ritson and Kellech Smith), Allens (Tim Allen, Richard Hamer and Miriam Stiel), Davies Collison Cave (Marion Heathcote, Ian Pascarl and David Webber), Gilbert + Tobin (John Lee, Lisa Lennon and Michael Williams) and Mallesons (Kate Hay, Cate Nagy and Matthew Swinn) each placed three lawyers on our list of experts. 

Lawyers from a total of 35 firms were honoured on our list of experts, demonstrating the shifting of Australia’s legal market, where many well-known lawyers have left some of the country’s larger practices to join smaller ones, or to go out on their own. Examples of such moves include former Griffith Hack lawyer Wayne Condon forming Biopharmalex, former Spruson & Ferguson senior associate David Müller-Wiesner joining GLMR, former Addisons partner Karen Hayne forming Omoi IP, former K&L Gates partner Naomi Pearce forming Pearce IP and Wayne McMaster, the former senior legal director at MinterEllison, who created a law firm using his name, Wayne McMaster. All were named to our list this year. 

Our survey includes only those lawyers working at law firms in Australia. 

Most of the lawyers named to our list have multiple practice specialties. Many of them are litigators, while others concentrate on prosecution work or provide strategic advice.  

All of them have something in common: they are Asia IP’s IP Experts for Australia. – GREGORY GLASS 

Australia’s IP Experts is based solely on independent editorial research conducted by Asia IP. As part of this project, we turned to thousands of in-house counsel in Australia, New Zealand, Asia and the Pacific, as well as Australia-focused partners at international law firms, and asked them to nominate private-practice lawyers, including foreign legal consultants, advisers and counsel.  

The final list reflects the nominations received combined with the input of the editorial team at Asia IP, which has more than 55 years of collective experience in researching and understanding the legal market in the region. 

All private practice intellectual property lawyers working at law firms in Australia were eligible for inclusion in the nomination process; there were no fees or any other requirements for inclusion. 

The names of our 50 IP Experts are published here. Each IP Expert was given the opportunity to include their biography and contact details in print and on our website, for which a fee was charged.