Nikolas Purcell

About Nikolas Purcell

Nik Purcell is a partner with Gowling WLG who litigates intellectual property disputes of every kind: patents, trademarks, copyright, industrial designs, trade secrets and even plant breeders' rights. The clients run the full range, from small businesses whose owners invented the product themselves up to multinational companies caught up in complicated patent proceedings.

You'll regularly find Purcell acting as counsel in the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal, both at trial and on appeal. The practice has also reached the Copyright Board of Canada, the Trademarks Opposition Board, Alberta's Court of King's Bench, and Ontario's Superior and Divisional Courts. Not every file is a fight, though. Clients also come for patentability and freedom-to-operate opinions, questions about who owns a patent, and trademark clearance and infringement advice.

Before law school, Purcell was a licensed pharmacist in British Columbia. Drawing on that pharmacy background, the lawyer went on to spend several years on patent disputes under the Patented Medicines (Notice of Compliance) Regulations, cases that often ran in parallel across several jurisdictions and called for close coordination with in-house and outside counsel. Called to the bar in Ontario in 2014 and in Alberta in 2022, Purcell worked at two Toronto IP litigation boutiques before joining Gowling WLG. Now based in Alberta, the partner has taken on many disputes over oil and gas and natural resources technology, from drilling and fracking to heavy oil extraction.

Writing is part of the work too. Purcell is the current author of the Pharmaceuticals chapter in Carswell's Intellectual Property Disputes: Resolutions and Remedies, and earlier pieces on biosimilars and digital health appeared in The Lawyers Weekly, Pharmaceutical Patent Analyst and the Electronic Healthcare Law Review. Away from client files, Purcell coaches the University of Calgary's team for the Harold G. Fox Intellectual Property Law Moot.