Our People
A specialist team of IP professionals dedicated to protecting what makes your business unique.
Our Story
Mills IP was founded with a clear purpose: to provide Australian businesses with specialist intellectual property advice that is practical, commercially grounded, and free of unnecessary complexity. From the outset, the firm has been built around the conviction that IP law is too important to be treated as a sideline practice.
What began as a focused trade mark practice has grown into a full-service IP firm with offices in Melbourne and Sydney, serving clients across Australia and internationally. That growth has been driven not by diversifying into unrelated areas of law, but by deepening expertise in the areas that matter most to brand owners — trade mark prosecution, enforcement, portfolio management, domain name disputes, and commercial IP transactions.
Throughout this journey, the firm’s approach has remained constant: understand the client’s business first, then deliver IP advice that makes commercial sense. This philosophy has earned the trust of startups, established Australian brands, and international businesses alike.
Our Mission
We concentrate exclusively on intellectual property law. This singular focus means our clients benefit from genuine depth of knowledge, not surface-level generalist advice.
Every recommendation we make starts with understanding your business context. We believe IP strategy should serve your commercial objectives, not the other way around.
We communicate in clear, straightforward language. Our clients deserve to understand their IP position fully — without wading through pages of legal jargon.
Our Values
We hold ourselves to the highest professional standards in every matter we handle.
We provide honest assessments and clear fee structures — no surprises.
We are responsive, approachable, and ready to act when our clients need us.
We work as an extension of our clients’ teams, aligning IP strategy with business goals.
Our Team
Our team combines deep specialist knowledge with real commercial awareness to deliver IP advice that makes a difference.
Founder
Erhan Karabardak is an intellectual property and technology lawyer with 30 years of experience in legal practice. After working in large Australian law firms, Erhan founded Cooper Mills Lawyers and later established Mills IP as a specialist intellectual property firm serving clients across Australia and internationally.
Erhan acts for brand owners in the management and protection of their intellectual property rights. His clients include both national and international businesses, including well known global brands. He acts in both litigious trade mark and copyright matters, brand protection, trade mark oppositions and prosecutions.
Erhan is also active in the domain name industry and represents domain name registrars and resellers. He has advised some of the world’s largest domain name registrars and is recognised as an expert in domain name law, having run some of the leading cases in the area.
Erhan previously served as a Director and Board Member of auDA, Australia’s Domain Name Regulator, since 2012. He was appointed Deputy Chairman in 2016 and served as Chair in 2017.
He is regularly engaged to provide expert advice and commentary on domain name and trade mark issues, and is an author of the IP publication Patents, Trade Marks and Related Rights (LexisNexis). Erhan is recognised as a leading trade mark professional by the World Trademark Review (The World’s Leading Trademark Professionals) from 2016 to 2026.
Erhan is approachable and provides commercially focused advice that helps clients make informed decisions about their IP strategy.
Senior Lawyer / Strategic IP Counsel
Professor John Swinson is a leading Australian intellectual property and technology lawyer with over 35 years of experience practising in both Australia and the United States. John graduated from the T.C. Beirne School of Law at The University of Queensland in 1988 with a University Medal, and holds a Master of Laws from Harvard Law School where he studied as a Fulbright Fellow and Frank Knox Scholar. He also holds a Bachelor of Arts majoring in computer science.
John was a partner at the international law firm King & Wood Mallesons from 1999 to 2021, and earlier in his career worked as an associate at Kenyon & Kenyon in New York City. He is admitted to the New York Bar and began his legal career as a judge’s associate to Justice C W Pincus of the Federal Court of Australia.
Since 2000, John has served as an arbitrator for the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) in Geneva, and has decided over 800 disputes regarding the ownership of domain names. He also served as Chairman of the auDA Policy Review Panel, which made recommendations to revise Australia’s domain name policies in 2019.
John is a Professor of Law at The University of Queensland, where he teaches privacy law, cybersecurity law, and Internet & IT law. He was previously an adjunct professor at QUT from 1999 to 2017. John is also the author of Patent Law for Australian Inventors and a contributor to leading IP and technology law publications through LexisNexis.
At Mills IP, John provides strategic counsel on the firm’s most complex intellectual property, technology, and domain name matters, drawing on his unique combination of world-class academic credentials and decades of hands-on commercial practice.
Ready to discuss your IP needs with a specialist team? Get in touch for a straightforward conversation about how we can help protect your business.