We welcome Maximilian Becker to our team as patent engineer.
Before joining Thum & Partner, he worked as battery scientist and project manager at Samsung SDI Europe after finishing his M. Sc. in chemistry and his Ph.D. in material science in Switzerland at the ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Material Science and Technology (Empa) in Dübendorf. In his Ph.D., he focused on the topic of lithium-ion batteries. At Samsung SDI Europe, Maximilian Becker gained practical experience in research and development of manufacturing solid-state batteries.
He is seeking admission as German and European Patent Attorney.
Thum & Partner has been recognized in the JUVE Patent UPC ranking 2026 in the category “UPC litigation”. We are delighted to receive such a positive mention.
JUVE Patent describes Thum & Partner as “one of the most established and experienced teams in UPC litigation” and highlights the broad variety of cases before the UPC in which Thum & Partner is involved. You can find our full company profile of the ranking here.
In addition, Bernhard Thum is mentioned as recommended individual (“excellent grasp of the legal and technical issues, commercially minded and practical, wealth of UPC experience, good in oral arguments”).
We would like to thank our clients and colleagues for their great cooperation and their trust and our whole team for their strong performance!
From November 15, you can find us in our new and bigger office at Ismaninger Str. 57, 81675 München.
The address of our office in Constance remains unchanged (Hofhalde 1, 78462 Konstanz).
We look forward to welcoming you to our new office in Munich.
Thum & Partner has been nominated in JUVE Patent`s 2025 Germany ranking in the category “Litigation: Patent Attorneys – Germany 2025” and has received a three-star rating.
JUVE Patent especially emphasizes the firm`s international focus as well as the involvement in numerous proceedings, including UPC disputes.
Bernhard Thum and Jonas Weickert are mentioned as “recommended individuals”.
Bernhard Thum has been listed again as “patent attorney with technical specialty”.
We are delighted to have received such a positive mention. We would like to thank our clients and colleagues for their great cooperation and their trust.
We welcome Manuel Soria Parra to our team as Senior Associate. Before joining Thum & Partner, the German and European Patent Attorney, UPC representative and European Trademark and Design Attorney worked for two renowned patent law firms in Munich. Manuel Soria Parra has practical experience as an engineer and extensive experience as Patent Engineer and Patent Attorney. He has a broad technical backgrounds, particularly in medical technology, renewable energies, smart buildings, robotics, mechatronics, automotive engineering, and general mechanical engineering.
He has been named “Rising IP Star” by the magazine “Managing IP” and “Strategy 300 Global Leader” by the magazine “Intellectual Asset Management”.
On September 18, 2025, our offices in Constance served as a venue for the second Bodensee IP Forum. Again, different professionals provided fascinating insights into a range of topics related to intellectual property law.
After last year’s edition of the Bodensee IP Forum already addressed various aspects of the Unified Patent Court (UPC), this year’s edition focused on current developments and field reports relating to the UPC as well as topics regarding design and IP protection and their enforcement on an international level.
Well-founded presentations, lively discussions and personal exchange followed by a networking reception provided for a valuable platform to dive into a variety of topics related to IP law.
On the website of the Bodensee IP Forum, you can find further information regarding the event hosted by Thum & Partner dedicated to IP law.
We extend our heartfelt thanks to all speakers and attendees, who played a key role in the success of this event. We are already looking forward to the next edition of this event!
We welcome Benjamin Kiehn to our team as Senior Associate. The German and European Patent Attorney and UPC representative previously worked for two renowned patent law firms in Munich and has several years of experience as a technical consultant and development engineer in the automotive industry. Benjamin Kiehn has a broad technical background, especially in mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering and automotive engineering. He strengthens our team in all aspects of patent law.
We welcome Laura Zak to our team as a patent engineer. Before joining Thum & Partner, she gained profound knowledge in component construction and technical drawing while working in the automotive industry alongside her studies of mechanical engineering. After finishing her studies, she gained practical experience in the development of alloys for 3D printing of electrotechnical applications. For her master’s thesis, Laura Zak focused on studying the influence of erosive lowering on surface and fringe characteristics of implant materials.
She is seeking admission as German and European Patent Attorney.
We are very proud of Felix Förschner and Johannes Potzy for passing this year’s European Qualifying Examination (EQE) of the European Patent Office (EPO)!
We are delighted to celebrate this important career step with them and look forward to continue working with them in the future.
In total, approximately 2,000 participants from 65 countries took part in this year’s EQE.
We are honoured to be included on the Financial Times and Statista Europe’s Leading Patent Law Firms 2025 award list. Thum & Partner is also included in the category “mechanical engineering”.
The latest annual listing of Europe’s leading patent law firms is based on recommendations by clients and peers and has been compiled by the statistics provider Statista in cooperation with the British newspaper Financial Times.
We welcome Anja Barfüßer to our team as a patent engineer. Before joining Thum & Partner, she focused on her Ph.D and studied time-resolved spectroscopy on semiconductor quantum dots (colloidal perovskite quantum dots) and researched the dynamics of excited states and characteristics of light amplification. Alongside her studies of Physics, she gained practical experience while working at the Chair for particle physics at the LMU in Munich and assisted in the assembly and quality control of Micromegas detectors for the ATLAS detector at CERN.
Anja Barfüßer published several scientific papers as lead and co-author, including in the prestigious Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) and in the high-impact journal Nano Letters.
She is seeking admission as German and European Patent Attorney.
Our firm is included in the Leaders League 2025 rankings both for patent litigation and patent prosecution.
Frank Eichelhardt and Bernhard Thum are recommended in the category “Intellectual property – Patent litigation”
Andreas Mötsch and Bernhard Thum are recommended in the category “Intellectual property – Patent prosecution”
We are delighted that our law firm has been listed once again in several renowned international rankings this year.
Bernhard Thum has been named in the ranking of “Germany’s Lawyers of the Year 2025” of the German business journal “Handelsblatt” in the category “Best Lawyers” for Intellectual Property Law.
Dr. Jonas Weickert has been listed for Intellectual Property Law in the “Ones to Watch” category.
Corresponding mentions can also be found in the international “Best Lawyers 2025” ranking.
In the current 2025 ranking of the Financial Times, our law firm Thum & Partner has been listed among “Europe’s Leading Patent Law Firms”, specifically in the field of mechanical engineering.
Bernhard Thum has also been recommended recently as “Patent Star 2025” in the international ranking of Managing IP for 2025.
We would like to thank our clients for the trust they have placed in us and our peers for their positive assessment.
We welcome Ioanna Besiri to our team as a patent engineer. Before joining Thum & Partner, Ioanna Besiri already gained experience as a patent engineer at a patent law firm and specialized in patent applications for the automotive industry (i.e., battery cells) and biotech companies.
During her Ph.D, she developed a cutting-edge rheometric reactor to record in situ in real-time the reaction kinetics of cross-linking systems (i.e., alginate-Ca2+ hydrogels). During her undergraduate studies as a Chemical Engineer, she gained experience in a wide range of engineering fields (fluid mechanics, polymers, rheology, material characterization) and the energy sector.
Her scientific results have been published in a number of peer-reviewed journals. Ioanna Besiri also attended several symposia in the field of chemical engineering as a speaker.
She is seeking admission as European Patent Attorney.
We cordially invite you to the Bodensee IP Forum 2025, which takes place on 18 September at the premises of our office in Constance. This year’s edition will focus on the Unified Patent Court (UPC) and its case law up until now.
After covering the basics at last year’s event, we want to take a closer look at the challenges and opportunities of the cross-border court system for patent disputes within the European Union.
Join us when our in-house experts as well as external professionals share their experiences and perspectives. Please visit the website of the Bodensee IP Forum for more information.
We welcome Philip Hellmann to our team as a patent engineer.
Before joining Thum & Partner, he gained experience in the area of metal 3D printing of aerospace components while working for a leading engine manufacturer in Germany alongside his studies of Aerospace Engineering. For his bachelor’s and master’s theses, he focused on the topics of recycling powdered metal for metal 3D printing as well as on designing and constructing an injector element for an aerospike rocket engine.
He is seeking admission as German and European Patent Attorney.
Carola Regensburger has completed her additional qualification as Certified IP Lawyer. In March 2025, she was presented with her certificate as a specialist lawyer. Thum & Partner congratulates her on this milestone.
The shortlists for the Managing IP EMEA Awards 2025 have been published today and we are proud to announce that Thum & Partner as well as our name partner Bernhard Thum are both shortlisted.
Thum & Partner is one of the nominees in the category “UPC Firm of the Year (Patent & Trademark Attorney Firms) – Germany”.
Bernhard Thum is shortlisted as “Practitioner of the Year (Patent & Trademark Attorney Firms) – Germany”.
Check out all shortlists here
You can also find our LinkedIn post here
We welcome Dr. Markus Ritter to our team as a patent engineer.
His Ph.D. in physics provides him with extensive experience in areas such as quantum technologies. Moreover, he developed a new semiconductor epitaxy method. He has won several awards for his research and his work has led to the filing of four patent applications. During his time at the European Innovation Council in Brussels and at the European Commission in Luxemburg, he gained further practical experience.
He is seeking admission as German and European Patent Attorney.
Just as in the previous years, Thum & Partner has been nominated once again in JUVE Patent`s 2024 ranking in the category “Litigation: Patent Attorneys – Germany 2024”. Bernhard Thum and Jonas Weickert are being mentioned as “recommended individuals”.
JUVE Patent emphasizes the firm`s involvement in high-volume UPC cases as well as the international focus.
For the fourth time since the founding of the firm, Bernhard Thum has been listed as “patent attorney with technical specialty”.
We are delighted to have received such a positive mention, which is the result of the efforts of our strong team. We would like to thank our clients and colleagues for the great cooperation and their trust.
You can find our LinkedIn post regarding this topic here.
We welcome Meri Meminaj to our team as a patent engineer.
Alongside her studies, she already gained experience during an internship as Textile Engineer at an international manufacturer of textiles and sports apparel before she started working as a Patent Examiner in the Young Professionals Program at the European Patent Office. She supports our team in handling European and PCT applications in search and examination proceedings as well as in opposition proceedings.
We welcome Felix Förschner to our team as a patent engineer. The interdisciplinary physicist began his training in 2019 at one of the largest patent law firms on Lake Constance and is aiming to be admitted as a German Patent Attorney and as a European Patent Attorney. He will strengthen our team, particularly in the fields of medical technology, mechanics, electrical engineering, and optics.
Bernhard Thum is again recommended by Who’s Who Legal. In the German ranking for 2024 he is included as IP Patent Agent.
We welcome Leander Lenhard to our team as Senior Associate. The German and European patent attorney and UPC representative previously worked for a renowned Munich law firm. The graduate engineer has extensive IP experience in the fields of automotive engineering, medical technology, information technology, robotics, materials technology and general mechanical engineering. He strengthens our team in all aspects of patent law and is involved in several cases at the new Unified Patent Court.
We welcome Sebastian Schneller to our team as Senior Associate. He is an attorney-at-law who previously worked for over a decade in one of the largest patent and law firms on Lake Constance. The experienced IP attorney strengthens our team in the areas of trademarks and designs, contract law and employee invention law as well as patent law opinions.
Thum & Partner is again recognized in JUVE Patent’s 2023 Ranking for “Patent Attorneys in Litigation” with Bernhard Thum and Jonas Weickert being mentioned as “recommended individuals”.
For the third time already since our launch in 2021, Bernhard Thum is further listed by JUVE Patent as patent attorney with technical specialty in Germany.
We are delighted to have received such a positive mention in the JUVE Patent Rankings 2023. Above all, we would like to thank our clients and their in-house teams for their trust and support, our partner law firms for the great cooperation and our great continuously growing team for the strong performance!
As an experienced German and European patent attorney, the physicist complements the spectrum of the partnership. In line with the firm’s philosophy, he will support our team and lead the way in addressing each case and each mandate individually in order to achieve success.
At his previous firm, he served large, medium, and small companies and was responsible for a large number of two-sided proceedings. Dr. Eichelhardt has already represented his clients in more than 100 oral hearings, most of them opposition proceedings before the European Patent Office and thus ideally complements our team, not least in view of the challenges of our already pending and future proceedings before the UPC.
We welcome Dr. Francesca Paola Quacquarelli as a patent engineer in our team. The Ph.D. physicist and successful scientist has several years of experience in the patent field and previously worked in a Munich law firm as well as in big English and American law firms. She is seeking admission as a European Patent Attorney and will strengthen the team primarily in the fields of medical technologies, optics, and electronics.
We welcome Dr. Johannes Potzy as a patent attorney candidate in our team. With his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, he has extensive experience in software development for robotics as well as in series and advance development of automated driving systems. He began his training at a renowned Munich law firm and is about to take the German patent attorney examination. He is also working towards admission as a European Patent Attorney. He strengthens the team in the fields of automation technology, robotics, automotive technology and mechanical engineering.
Today, Germany has ratified the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court. The system will accordingly start on 1 June 2023. The so-called sunrise period will start on 1 March 2023.
We look forward to this new era of the European patent landscape and all the opportunities and challenges it brings.
We welcome Matthias Schädler as an associate in our team. The German patent attorney previously worked for a Munich law firm and is also seeking admission as a European Patent Attorney. During his studies at the Technical University of Munich, he specialized, inter alia, in automotive and engine technology and worked for companies in the automotive industry. He strengthens our team primarily in the fields of automotive, mechanical engineering and medical technology.
One year after the start of our law firm, Thum & Partner is recognized in JUVE Patent’s 2022 Ranking for “Patent Attorneys in Litigation” with Bernhard Thum and Jonas Weickert being mentioned as “recommended individuals”.
For the second time already since our launch, Bernhard Thum is further listed by JUVE Patent as patent attorney with technical specialty in Germany.
We are pleased about this rating. We will continue to give our best to live up to this recognition. Thanks to our clients and colleagues for the good collaboration, and congratulations to our motivated and growing team.
One year ago, our law firm started operations. We look back on successful and exciting first twelve months. Our entire team would like to thank our clients for their trust, our partners for the great cooperation, our opponents for the good and fair disputes, and our friends for their constant support.
We welcome Stefan Baldus as a patent attorney candidate in our team. He graduated with an M. Sc. in chemical and bioengineering from FAU Erlangen, where he focused on adherent brain cells on microcarriers and sustainable chemical technologies for the generation of regenerative carbon monoxide. He also worked in the aerospace industry and for an automotive manufacturer. With his broad technical background, he strengthens our team in the fields of process engineering, biotechnology, medical technology and automotive engineering.
In August 2022, the Who’s Who Legal IP Report for the year 2022 was published. We are pleased that our partner Bernhard Thum is again listed therein this year.
You can find more details here.
In July 2022, the global ranking IAM Patent 1000 – The World’s Leading Patent Professionals for the year 2022 was published. We are pleased that our partner Bernhard Thum is again listed therein this year.
You can find more details here.
Today, we were thrilled when the results of the European Qualification Examination (EQE) came in: Nadine Losleben and Leonhard Walther have both passed the EQE. They will now be registered as European Patent Attorneys very soon.
Congratulations, what a success!
On June 24, 2022, the German newspaper Handelsblatt published the current rankings for the best lawyers in Germany in 2022, based on the international survey Best Lawyers 2022. We are pleased that our partner Bernhard Thum is again listed as one of the Best Lawyers 2022 in the field of Intellectual Property. You can find more details here.
In recognition of her contributions to the Licensing Executives Society International (LESI), Dr. Georgina Busku was awarded a golden lion award at the opening ceremony of this year’s LESI annual meeting in Venice. This award recognizes members who embody attributes that make LESI successful. A well-deserved honor for Foreign Counsel Dr. Georgina Busku, the former International Chair of the LESI Young Members Committee.
Congratulations!
Our attorneys Dr. Nadine Losleben and Carola Schmidt are now supporting the Female Founders Academy 2022 as contact persons for IP issues. As part of an annually recurring program, this joint initiative of the universities of Bayreuth, Passau and Mannheim aims to encourage female students and research assistants to start up their own businesses and to introduce them to topics such as ideation, prototyping and the development of business models.
After the minimum number of ratifications of the Protocol for the Provisional Application of the Agreement was reached on January 19, 2022, the preparatory phase for the Unified Patent Court has officially started. A recent article on this topic can be found on JUVE Patent.
It is generally expected that the preparations will take about eight months. These include, among other things, the selection of suitable judges. Towards the end of 2022, the Unified Patent Court could thus start its work. The European unitary patent is now within reach.
We are already evaluating the implications for our clients and the opportunities and risks arising from this new development.
We are pleased to welcome Dr. Georgina Busku as a new member of our team. As Foreign Counsel, she will raise Thum & Partner’s international profile. She is a former chair of LESI YMC (Licensing Executives Society International Young Members Committee), a board member of LES Hungary, and an active member of international and national professional associations. Georgina Busku will bring to us her vast experience in trademark law as well as in technology transfer and licensing matters, gained, inter alia, as Managing Director in the Hungarian liaison office of an established IP law firm in the Middle East.
On October 29, 2021, the current rankings for the most relevant law firms and attorneys in patent law in Germany were published in JUVE Patent. We are pleased to announce that our partner Bernhard Thum is listed as one of the 20 individually recommended patent attorneys in Germany in the category “Leading Individuals – Patent attorneys with technical specialty”. You can find more details here.
On October 01, 2021, the law firm Thum & Partners has started operation in Munich-Bogenhausen with a team of 13 attorneys, selected patent paralegals and translators, and in close cooperation with leading law firms in the field of intellectual property. We would like to thank all our clients who have placed their trust in us from the very beginning.