The year 2021 is a challenging year!

This is not just because business is starting to resume after the lockdown measures put in place to control the pandemic in 2020 and despite the fact that the health crisis is, sadly, far from being over.

But it is also because industrial property is undergoing major changes. Some of these are statutory and regulatory changes of course but the law is also becoming more and more case law based, to an extent following the common law tradition. This means that it is increasingly necessary to keep a close eye on the decisions of the trademark offices and the courts. Not a problem for Inlex as we have been doing precisely that for many years now. Reading these case law developments is essential for our understanding of current trends and offers an opportunity to share our views on these developments (our staff wrote over 135 articles in 2020!).

So, in 2021, we will be continuing this internal training drive with more than 30 in-house events on new case law, best practice and the like. These initiatives will be carried out by our staff and widely shared by our teams. It is also worth mentioning that we are increasingly being asked to deliver training to our clients and to help to spread best practice, clearly a sign of a desire for greater efficiency.

We have also started work to express our opinions (even) more clearly through a Legal Design approach. The aim is not necessarily to reduce the length of legal texts (especially as we do not consider at all that this is a good idea in the area of contracts) but rather to emphasise the choice of the right words, verb tenses, structuring of reasoning, proofreading, etc.

In short, we are focusing on conciseness and clarity of legal issues but without oversimplifying matters.

And we are very excited about our continued growth!

Eric Schahl