What aspects of your work do you enjoy most, and why?

I actually most enjoy teaching advanced intellectual property – particularly patent and licensing law – at several universities both domestically and outside of Germany. After this, my great interest is in active mediation concerning high-tech patent litigation problems.

How have client demands shifted over the course of your career, and how have you adapted your approach to meet these?

Client demands have indeed shifted – namely, they have stopped looking at single patents covering isolated ‘unilateral’ innovations but are checking the quality of the whole patent portfolio to be able to use these as currency for cross-licensing and freedom-to-operate programmes. 

What are the biggest challenges surrounding licensing or negotiations within new markets, and how can one overcome these?

The biggest challenge surrounding licensing within new markets is the great lack of transparency in relation to royalty rates, which makes it difficult to easily determine conditions for SEP/FRAND licensing.

The recently appointed director general of ETSI plans to “take a fresh start” with the European Commission. What impact do you expect this new approach to have on SEP strategies, and why?

I do expect that ETSI will finally, finally take over the burden of conducting essentiality checks for self-declared SEPs, thereby giving a solid basis for determining maximum global aggregate royalty rates in the sense of the EU draft regulation of 27 April 2023. 

You are celebrated as one of Germany’s leading IP professionals. What has been the secret to your success?

If there is any secret to my success, as you call it, it would be that I have never considered patents as mere instruments to exclude others from the use of certain technologies, rather as vehicles allowing the sharing of patented technologies with mankind. In this context, in my opinion, what is missing is a trusted depository for trade secrets and data (particularly training data for generative AI), which has become even more advisable to be created with the new guidelines concerning AI data transparency, like in the EU AI Data Act.