Heinz Goddar

How has your position as president of LES International influenced your approach to IP strategy today?

My former position as president of LES International continues to influence my approach to IP strategy even today. It taught me that patents are the currency of transnational trade and the ideal vehicles for technology transfer. Accordingly, my current activities have a lot to do with IP-related transactions of many kinds. 

One year after the launch of the UPC, preliminary decisions are already shaping global litigation strategies. What impactful developments are you watching for from the court in its second year?

The manner in which the UPC will handle bifurcation and proportionality remains to be seen. If the court does not fulfill the high expectations of patentees worldwide to swiftly get injunctive relief – based on good patents –they will increasingly turn to national courts in countries where double protection via unitary patent and national patent is possible, like in Germany. 

What recent decisions or legislative developments in Germany are having the most significant impact on IP strategy?

In Germany, the most significant impact is being felt by the German legislator allowing the co-existence of national German patents and unitary patents. The result of this is that a best-practice strategy now nearly always requires an applicant to file both an EPC application at the EPO and a national one in parallel at the German Patent and Trademark Office – and the latter, for the time being, without an examination request and based on machine translation. This life-insurance strategy enables the patience to wait for UPC case law to develop, which will impact a lot of patent strategy decisions worldwide. 

As a leader, how do you ensure that each member of your team fulfils their potential and how do you measure the whole team’s success?

I certainly do not measure the whole team’s success by only – or mainly – looking at numbers (ie, fees charged to and obtained from clients or customers). Instead, I consider punctual, high-quality work that enables positive acquisition results for an IP firm’s ‘rainmakers’ to be the most important feature.

What do you predict will be the biggest issue facing your clients over the next 12 months, and how are you preparing to help them mitigate this?

The biggest issue facing our clients will be finding a convenient, just and peaceful way to get access to highly patented standards and bringing SEP/FRAND discussions out of ordinary courts and into the hands of globally accepted mediation/arbitration bodies. 

Heinz Goddar

Partner 
[email protected]

Dr Heinz Goddar is a partner at Boehmert & Boehmert. He is past president of LES International and LES Germany and an inductee of the IAM IP Hall of Fame 2014. Since 2023, he has been co-editor with Melanie Müller of Trade Secrets Throughout the World. Dr Goddar has a PhD in physics, teaches IP law at the University of Bremen and is a lecturer at Bucerius Law School and numerous other universities worldwide.



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