David Stewart

Dave Stewart is a specialist intellectual property lawyer with a forte in legal brand clearance, IP licensing, and trade mark oppositions, and heads up our team of three specialist intellectual property lawyers.

Dave Stewart is a specialist intellectual property lawyer.

Dave has been consistently recognised as one of Australia’s leading trade mark lawyers in rankings and legal services guides such as Managing IP’s IP Stars, WTR1000, and Doyles. Dave was admitted as a lawyer in 1995, as a registered trade mark attorney in 1999, and as a public notary in 2012. From 2000 to 2003 Dave practiced in IP in Hong Kong. Dave has appeared as counsel in around thirty trade mark opposition and ex parte hearings, and acted for clients in hundreds of trade mark proceedings before the Australian trade mark registrar.

Dave was awarded a Masters in IP Law in 2000 and appointed an Adjunct Professor at Murdoch University in 2013. He has lectured at Murdoch University, the Australian Graduate School of Management in Hong Kong, Edith Cowan University, and in 2004 and 2005 in Phnom Penh for The Asia Foundation on the IP implications of Cambodia joining the World Trade Organisation (TRIPs).

In 2018, Dave attended the Oxford University Saïd Business School programme on negotiation. Dave attended the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s Advanced Domain Name Workshop in Geneva in 2011 and has run many UDRP disputes.

Dave also has extensive experience in negotiating and drafting IP and IT documents in significant transactions: the sale of a film library (2000); the CRM pilot for one of the world’s largest brewers (2001); the franchise of a lingerie company into Greater China (2003); IT and service agreements for national expansion of a regional bank (2006-7); a services agreement between a bank and a large telco (2008); a trade secret protocol (2014); a geospatial AI license (2021); various historical archive acquisition agreements (2022); a circuit board trade secret cross-license (2023); various IP agreements for a regional newspaper (2023); a public art commissioning agreement (2025); as well as a vast number of trade mark, patent, copyright and design licenses and assignments, distribution agreements, influencer and talent agreements, publishing agreements, and especially software licenses and maintenance agreements. In 2025, Dave attended the University College London’s course on IP transactions.

Dave has written for or been covered by the Wall Street Journal, the South China Morning Post, the Australian Financial Review, The Guardian, and The West Australian newspapers. Dave appeared in the 2006 ABC documentary “The Good, The Bad and the Ugg Boot”, to do with a trade mark dispute concerning the Ugg boots brand in which Dave acted for the successful parties.