Your property rights in good hands: our services
You continue innovating – and let us take care of all the legal matters! For example, we’ll support you with the development, registration, and pursuit of your property rights. Moreover, we’ll advise you strategically on the systematic set-up, management, and maintenance of a patent portfolio, the design of intellectual property rights management for your operation, and due-diligence processes.
We’ll represent you in all matters relating to industrial property rights and associated areas of law before courts and authorities. This includes defending and enforcing your intellectual property rights.
Is your innovation at all patentable? Are there any intellectual property rights that stand in the way of your development? And are your existing property rights actually legally valid? We will also support you when it comes to such issues, for example through research, assessments and freedom-to-operate analyses. And we will check whether your intellectual property rights possibly collide with third-party rights or might even be infringed by third parties. Moreover, we will prepare reports on whether your property rights might possibly also affect essential technologies, without which other companies would have no access to the market.
If you reach special R&D, demarcation or licensing agreements with competitors, we will support you with the relevant contractual issues. And should these or other issues lead to a dispute with the other party, you can also count on us. We’ll advise and represent you – in alternative dispute settlement procedures (e.g. in arbitration courts) too.
Profitable growth through innovation: our IP consulting
Significantly more potential than you think lies in patents, utility models, trademarks, and designs. As long as these IP rights specifically protect what makes your business profitable and what your customers are willing to pay a higher price for, your IP portfolio is more valuable than before.
IP strategies
We always take a holistic approach and will support you in successfully positioning yourself and your intellectual property rights in the market as an innovative company.
China Desk
Are you and your company active in China and do you plan to also protect your ideas outside the People's Republic – for example in Europe – and to enforce your rights there? Or the other way around: Are you a European company and wish to pursue your property rights strategy in an emerging country like China? Then we should get to know each other!
Start-Ups
Do you have an idea for a product that has never existed before? And do you have plans to turn this idea into a business? Congratulations! You’ve already taken the first steps. But to make sure your idea is not copied or marketed by others, IP rights are in many cases essential. Patents, utility models, trademarks, and so on secure your path to independence. We will support you so that you can enjoy the maximum benefit from these IP rights!
Getting your rights right
Intellectual property rights are a complex area — but also provide a host of opportunities for innovative companies. All patent attorneys and attorneys at COHAUSZ & FLORACK possess considerable expertise in this area and will show you the measures that make best sense for your business.
Prosecution
Companies that are able to protect their inventions can secure important competitive advantages. Find out more about the property rights that might suit you!
Litigation
We’ll support you in infringement proceedings in court, in opposition or revocation proceedings or at arbitration tribunals. Furthermore, we’ll show you exactly what to do when counterfeits of your products come into circulation.
Validity proceedings
We stand up for you if your intellectual property rights are attacked or if you want to challenge the validity of someone else‘s property right.
Research
Prior to the registration of intellectual property rights and also while maintaining your existing portfolio, you should keep a good eye on the market. In that way, you can stay on the safe side and effectively prevent risks.
Employee inventions
Do you have innovative employees? We’ll develop processes with which you can use and secure the valuable ideas of your employees.
Patent and trademark monitoring
The competition never sleeps and whoever launches new products on the market will be under constant observation by the competition. In order to prevent allegations of infringement, innovative companies can systematically monitor existing patents, trademarks and designs.
Fee monitoring
Your intellectual property rights are a valuable asset. A loss of rights can therefore have serious economic consequences. We prevent this by carefully monitoring the annual fees due.
Legal counselling
You’re competent in your own line of business. And when it comes to legally protecting the activities of your company, you’ve got us! We’ll represent your interests and advise you in all manner of complex issues in connection with your intellectual property rights.
It’s the technology that counts
As certified engineers, physicists or chemists, all patent attorneys at COHAUSZ & FLORACK have a thorough understanding of their respective specialist fields. But not only that. They combine their technical scientific expertise with exceptional patent know-how – the ideal combination in order to support our clients effectively.
Electrical engineering
Our patent attorneys deal with technical property rights in all areas of electrical engineering—for example in the areas of renewable energy, semiconductors and devices, microsystems technology and sensor technology.
Mechanical engineering
Mechanical engineering is our home turf. Our clients in this line of business are companies that are heavily export-oriented and rooted mainly in Germany and Europe, for example in the fields of process and production technology, civil engineering, mechatronics, and medical technology.
Chemistry, pharmaceuticals, life sciences
Our clients include companies from the chemical industry as well as the areas of pharmaceuticals and life sciences. We support them in all patent issues, thus defining preferably comprehensive protection for their inventions – protection that cannot be bypassed.
Physics
Physical inventions are an important pillar for our firm. They often involve innovations regarding new materials, or developments involving physical procedures.
IT and communication technology
Many software-related inventions can be protected by intellectual property rights. We support our clients in doing so. In addition, as patent attorneys for the IT industry, we are also active in the area of communication technology.
IP rights
Would you like to find out how patents, trademarks, or designs work, what exactly they protect, and how you can get this protection?
Patents
A patent protects a technical invention. As IP rights and prohibitive rights, patents secure a geographically restricted monopoly for patent holders with the option of licensing for a period of up to 20 years.
Trademarks
Trademarks are mainly used to indicate the origin of a company’s goods and services and at the same time to distinguish them from the offerings of competitors. The marks eligible for protection include words, letters, numbers, images, colors, holograms, multimedia marks, or sounds, as well as combinations of these elements.
Designs
A registered design or utility model is an industrial property right that gives you, as the owner, the exclusive right to use an aesthetic appearance for a product. Such products may be industrially or manually manufactured products, such as clothing, furniture, vehicles, fabrics, objects and machines of all kinds, or graphic symbols such as logos.