Katharine has been a partner at Bird & Bird since 1999.  She is Joint Head of the Intellectual Property Department in London.

Katharine specialises in intellectual property litigation, with particular emphasis on multi-jurisdictional patent disputes, and was part of the team acting in the Baxter v. Pharmacia & Upjohn and Baxter v. Genetics Institute European disputes. Since her background is in engineering, she has a particular interest in the electronic, computer technology and engineering sectors, more recently leading the teams in Storage Computer Corp v. Hitachi (RAID storage systems) and DRS Data & Research Services plc v. NCS Pearson Inc (software patents in the education field) Qualcomm Inc v. Nokia Corp and Interdigital Technology Corp v. Nokia Corp (mobile phones) and Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV & Others v Amino Communications (MPEG-2 Video compression).

Katharine advises clients in trade mark and design actions, for example, she acted for Nestlé in their action against Unilever in which they opposed registration of the shape of Viennetta ice cream and also in their action relating to the design rights in a drinking straw and breach of confidential information in the recipe relating to beads inside the straw.  She is also experienced in designing pan-European enforcement strategies based on designs and trade marks. For one multinational consumer electronics corporation, she designed, implemented and managed such a programme in all 27 countries of Europe.

Katharine has a Masters in Mechanical Engineering from Bristol University.  Her final year dissertation was in robotics.  She then worked for Austin Rover before qualifying as solicitor.

Katharine reports monthly on trade mark, design and copyright matters for the Journal of the Chartered Institute of Patent Agents and also sits on the trade marks committee for the Institute.