Intellectual Property Rights (IP)

Intellectual property is an integral part of the commercial business solutions of Deloitte Legal. Our specialists in intellectual property are legal practitioners who have longstanding experience in advising companies and extensive forensic practice at all pertinent courts. They cover all areas of intellectual property law from trademark to patent to copyright law and have pertinent experience in more specialized fields, such as plant variety right protection or semiconductor protection. Our cooperation with tax and consulting member firm practitioners from across the Deloitte organization helps us to provide cross-disciplinary services. We are in constant contact with patent and trademark offices on a national and international level.

Our main focus lies in identifying the appropriate legal instruments to protect the IP and related commercial rights of the companies we represent. In particular the protection of IP in the digital era brings new challenges across, be it IP in the cloud or in the industry 4.0 environment.

We provide an ongoing and comprehensive service to our clients from registration through to licensing up to the assertion of their intellectual property rights against third party infringement. We are firm believers in preventative contract drafting to anticipate and pre-empt unlawful infringements by third parties of existing property rights or rights of use as well as to appropriately exploit IP assets by way of licensing.

Our clients get further support in all aspects of unfair competition law comprising the planning of their market presence and the legal issues related to their marketing concepts as well as the legal defense and assertion of all rights against competitors.

Our services cover the entire life cycle of intellectual property: 

Our areas of expertise

...comprise at first the comprehensive advisory, contract drafting, IP application and representation before courts in the classic IP law and practice areas… 

• Trademark law 
• Patent law 
• Utility model law
• Employee invention law
• Design law
• Copyright and software law 
• Semiconductor and plant variety law
• Unfair competition law
• Licensing
• Information and data protection in terms of know-how, trade and business secrets as well as other corporate values such as customer and employee data or reputation

...and we set the focus on topics raised by the digital era...

• Industrial and intellectual property in the environment of the industry 4.0, e.g. 3D printing, M2M communication, internet of things (IoT)
• Analytics, protection of data bases, data rights, data ownership, machine generated knowledge and data 
• Digital rights und license management, Blockchain
• IP in the cloud (cloud-based information and data transfers respectively technology transfers), Software-as-a-Service
• IP allocation, IP valuation and taxation
• Protection against IP theft / cyber attacks