Sébastien Gardère is a partner in Gowling WLG's Montréal office, practising in both advertising and marketing law and intellectual property law, with a particular focus on trademarks and copyrights.
Sébastien represents and advises both SMEs and major international firms from a variety of sectors: transportation, sports and leisure, food, restaurants, alcoholic beverages, hotels, luxury goods (cosmetics, jewelry, clothing and accessories), finance and banking, entertainment, chemical, medical and agriculture.
Sébastien acts as a business adviser helping clients in all aspects relating to the protection of their trademarks, as well as all matters pertaining to the advertisement and promotion of their goods and services. Prior to joining Gowling WLG, he worked in the legal department of a Canadian multinational business and also served as the Canadian national leader of the trademarks group for an international law firm.
Over the course of his 18 years of cumulative practice, he has cultivated solid experience with respect to:
- trademark selection and clearance searching;
- the management and protection of trademark portfolios in Canada and globally (trademark prosecution, trademark opposition and expungement proceedings, and trademark disputes);
- drafting and negotiating various trademark license, assignment, sales, acquisition and coexistence agreements;
- the creation of advertising campaigns and advertising and promotional messages across a variety of media and platforms;
- the different aspects of social media use for advertising purposes;
- product packaging and labelling regulation;
- Charter of the French Language issues;
- publicity contests;
- drafting and negotiating sponsorship, spokesperson and social media influencer agreements; and
- domain name disputes.
Year Joined Firm: 2004
Education/Alumni: Intellectual Property Institute of Canada; Université de Montréal LLB
