1. What is the current legal landscape for Intellectual Property in your jurisdiction?

Despite its size, Luxembourg carries far more weight than it might appear in intellectual property terms and understanding why is the key to understanding the current landscape. The Grand Duchy pools its trademark and design law with Belgium and the Netherlands within the Benelux system, operates a national patent office alongside the European Patent Convention, and now hosts the Court of Appeal of the Unified Patent Court. In practice, this means clients rarely deal with “Luxembourg IP law” in isolation. They work with Benelux law, EU law and, increasingly, a new layer of European patent litigation, all within a legal and business environment shaped by the country’s role as a financial and fund centre.

Patents

Patent protection is typically obtained either through the national route, via the Ministry of the Economy’s Intellectual Property Office, or through the European route, via the European Patent Office under the European Patent Convention. What has really changed the picture since 2023 is the arrival of the Unitary Patent and the Unified Patent Court (UPC). The Court of First Instance handles most of the day to day litigation out of Paris, Munich and Milan, but the Court of Appeal, whose decisions will ultimately settle divergences between those divisions and shape European patent case law more broadly, sits in Luxembourg, next door to the Court of Justice of the European Union. For a jurisdiction of this size, that gives Luxembourg a disproportionate influence over how patent disputes will be decided across the continent in the years ahead.

Trademarks and designs

There is no Luxembourg trademark or design as such. Under the Benelux Convention on Intellectual Property, administered by the Benelux Office for Intellectual Property (BOIP), protection is obtained through a single, unitary Benelux title that automatically and simultaneously takes effect in Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands, with one filing, one registration number and one owner. Rights can also be acquired through an EU trademark or design filed at the EUIPO, or through an international registration designating one of these territories under the Madrid or Hague systems. Only registered rights are protected, apart from the narrow exception for marks that are genuinely well known under the Paris Convention. Clients need to think in Benelux or EU terms from the outset, rather than treating national filing as a first step and international protection as an afterthought.

Copyright

Copyright is the area where the most visible legislative change has taken place recently. It remains governed by the amended Law of 18 April 2001, but that framework was substantially updated when Luxembourg transposed the EU Digital Single Market Directive (Directive (EU) 2019/790) in March 2022. That transposition introduced a fairer remuneration mechanism for authors and performers, and clarified when online content sharing platforms can be held liable for content uploaded by their users, which matters greatly in a market where an increasing share of creative and commercial content now lives online rather than on paper. Enforcement of all these rights, copyright included, still runs through the Law of 22 May 2009 transposing the EU IP Enforcement Directive.

What often surprises clients most is how much of Luxembourg’s IP attractiveness sits in the tax code rather than in IP law itself. Article 50ter of the Income Tax Law exempts 80% of qualifying net income from patents, utility models and copyright protected software, including royalties, capital gains and embedded income. Trademarks and other purely marketing related assets do not qualify, and the exemption is tied to actual research and development expenditure, under the OECD’s modified nexus approach, rather than to simple ownership of the asset.

Over the next twelve months, one legislative development is worth watching closely. The EU’s design law reform is being phased in, with most of the substantive changes already applied since May 2025, and a second wave, covering the representation of digital and animated designs, due from July 2026, ahead of a December 2027 deadline for national transposition.

What distinguishes Luxembourg is the combination of these elements: a jurisdiction fully integrated into the Benelux and EU registration systems, which also hosts the very court set to shape European patent law, and which backs its innovation ecosystem with tax incentives and grants that clients can genuinely use. For businesses weighing where to file, litigate or structure their IP assets in Europe, that combination deserves particular attention.

2. What three essential pieces of advice would you give to clients involved in Intellectual Property matters?

Our clients range from early-stage tech companies to established groups whose IP already represents a significant part of their balance sheet or their valuation. Three pieces of advice apply across both.

Make sure the company actually owns what it thinks it owns. For a startup, this means signed assignment agreements with every founder, employee and contractor from day one, rather than sorted out in a rush once an investor starts asking questions. For an established group, it means periodically checking that acquisitions, joint ventures and cross-border teams have not left gaps in the chain of title, and that the group’s IP sits in a structure that genuinely reflects how the business is run.

Manage the portfolio actively rather than simply accumulating filings. A young company should prioritise what genuinely differentiates it, protect the rest through trade secrets where that is cheaper and just as effective, and file before disclosing. An established company should regularly prune assets that no longer serve the business and realign its filing strategy with where it is actually heading.

In both cases, IP is not just a legal shield, it is a financial and competitive asset. A well organised portfolio can be pledged as collateral to raise debt financing without diluting equity, licensed to generate recurring revenue, or built up deliberately with an eventual sale or exit in mind, and it raises the cost and risk for any rival trying to enter or expand into the company’s territory.

Remember that IP is being valued by someone else and prepare for that from the outset. Investors, lenders, private equity buyers and JV partners never take a company’s IP position at face value. They test what has been filed, how complete and defensible the protection is, and how it contributes to the overall valuation of the business.

A credible, well documented and actively managed IP portfolio is one of the clearest signals a company can send to demonstrate real, defensible value, and a well-structured one can genuinely add 20 to 40% to a valuation, making it consistently one of the strongest levers clients have when attracting investors or negotiating a deal.

3. What are the greatest threats and opportunities in Intellectual Property law in the next 12 months?

For both young tech companies and established groups, the current environment presents genuine opportunities alongside real risks, and the two are often connected.

Opportunities. The IP Box regime under Article 50ter of the Income Tax Law exempts 80% of qualifying net income from patents, utility models and protected software, making Luxembourg attractive for holding and licensing IP, not just for filing it.

The Law of 17 May 2017, implemented by the Ministry of the Economy with Luxinnovation, complements this by covering up to half the costs an SME incurs in obtaining, validating and defending a patent or other intangible asset, offering concrete support at both the filing and exploitation stages. Finally, the Unitary Patent and the Unified Patent Court, whose Court of Appeal sits in Luxembourg, now allow a single action to protect an invention across most of the EU.

Threats. Cybercrime remains a major risk, a single intrusion exposing unpublished R&D or client data can undo years of building a portfolio. Counterfeiting and piracy remain a persistent risk, particularly online. Artificial intelligence is a threat with two faces: generative tools can reproduce artistic works, texts or inventions without their creators’ consent, while the same tools increase the risk of trade secret leakage when employees feed them confidential information.

More broadly, AI is pushing clients to rethink their copyright and trade secret strategy even before dedicated Luxembourg legislation catches up. The most fragile moment remains the period before filing, any leak or theft of internal information can destroy the value of an innovation before it is formally protected. Before the UPC, there is a risk that a single central revocation action could wipe out protection across every participating state.

4. How do you maintain client satisfaction?

Client satisfaction in IP work rarely comes down to legal technique alone. Most of our clients are not IP specialists themselves, they are founders, in house counsel or executives running a business, and what they want is a clear, honest answer to a business question, in language they do not have to decode.

Trust is built by showing, not telling, that we take the protection of a client’s most valuable assets seriously.

A proactive, tech forward approach, from AI powered watch services that catch infringement early to digital tools that keep a portfolio visible and up to date, demonstrates that commitment in practice, rather than as a promise in an engagement letter.

We also adapt to who we are actually speaking with. A first-time founder needs a different conversation than a general counsel managing a mature multi jurisdiction portfolio, and Luxembourg’s own Benelux and EU based framework makes getting that explanation right early especially important.

We also make a point of building a clear picture of a client’s business operations and how they actually engage with their IP portfolio, so that advice is genuinely grounded in their reality rather than generic.

From there, satisfaction is sustained through transparency and regular, clear updates rather than silence between exchanges, and through flagging a risk, a renewal or a regulatory change before we are asked.

That combination, proactive protection paired with honest, ongoing communication, is what lets clients feel genuinely confident in their IP strategy, and what turns a single engagement into a lasting relationship.

5. What technological advancements are reshaping Intellectual Property law, and how can clients benefit from them?

Technology is transforming IP on two fronts at once: it creates new categories of subject matter that the law has to catch up with, from software to databases, and it delivers new tools to manage rights more effectively.

Artificial intelligence is forcing a rethink of who can be an author or an inventor and is putting pressure on how training data interacts with existing copyright.

It is also pushing data itself to the forefront, proprietary databases and the algorithms built on them are increasingly treated as strategic assets, usually protected through trade secrecy rather than registration.

On the tools side, AI is becoming valuable for trademark and patent watch services, prior art searches and drafting first versions of routine filings, lowering the cost of preparatory work.

Blockchain solves an old problem, proving who created something and when. A timestamped record gives real evidential weight to a trade secret or an unregistered design before any formal filing exists. It also supports smart contracts for licensing and supply chain traceability against counterfeiting.

Digitalisation is also transforming how rights themselves are processed, the UPC runs entirely on a digital case management system, and most European registries have moved online.

The benefit for clients is concrete: continuous rather than periodic monitoring, evidence of ownership established before registration, and disputes caught earlier and at lower cost. The businesses getting the most value out of this shift are the ones building these tools into their strategy, rather than treating them as a simple technical upgrade.