Speakers: Innovation as a Tool for Tackling Global Challenges

Florian Adt, General Counsel/COO, Mercedes-Benz Intellectual Property GmbH &
Co. KG
Florian Adt, LL.M. (Bruges), is the Chief Operating Officer and the General Counsel of Mercedes-Benz Intellectual Property GmbH & Co. KG. Mr Adt oversees the legal and compliance matters of the Mercedes-Benz Group relating to Intellectual Property. This includes in particular the management of patent disputes, the enforcement of own IP rights as well as the steering of the compliance measures relating to the management of intellectual property at the Mercedes-Benz Group.

In the course of his professional career at the Mercedes-Benz Group, Mr Adt gained a broad experience in a variety of legal fields – ranging from general civil law to distribution law, corporate law, criminal law, public law, antitrust law and intellectual property law.

Barbla Plattner, Member of the Executive Team, Head of Talent and Organization Development, Innosuisse – Swiss Innovation Agency
Since her childhood, Barbla Plattner has always liked to push the boundaries and break new ground. Like Steve Jobs she learned early on that “great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team”, and therefore pursued a career in Human Resources (HR) to make things happen with people. This has led her to live and work in a few countries and take on various roles as a HR Consultant, Project Manager, Business Partner, Coach and Leader. Barbla actively contributes to moving the world with Swiss innovation since 2018 when she joined Ava, a promising scale-up in women’s health. She joined the Executive Team of Innosuisse, the Swiss Innovation Agency, as Head of Talent and Organisation Development in August 2020. Barbla is tri-lingual, studied social sciences at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland and completed a MSc in Human Resource Management in London. Barbla lives near Zurich with her husband and 6-year-old son. She enjoys travelling the world, sailing and skiing.

Paula Reichenberg, attorney-at-law registered with the Zurich Bar, Vice-President of the Swiss LegalTech Association, CEO & Founder of Neur.on – AI-powered Translation Software for Legal, Tax & Finance
Paula Reichenberg is a lawyer-linguist, entrepreneur, and lifelong tech learner. She was born and raised in Geneva, studied law in Fribourg in both French and German, passed the bar in Zurich, and worked in the M&A and Capital Markets team of a large Swiss law firm, before completing an MBA at INSEAD in 2007. Upon graduating, she founded her first company, Hieronymus – Translations by Lawyers for Lawyers – a high-end legal language service provider. In 2020, she created LexMachina, the first Neural Machine Translation engine for Swiss lawyers; two years later, with the support of a select panel of investors from the international LegalTech and legal publishing industries, she founded Neur.on, a SaaS platform empowering lawyers in their translation tasks. Paula is the Vice President of the Swiss LegalTech Association, and closely follows new market trends and technological innovations.

Wolf Meier-Ewert, Counsellor – Secretary of the Council for TRIPS, World Trade Organization
Mr. WOLF R. MEIER-EWERT is a Counsellor in the Intellectual Property, Government Procurement and Competition Division of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which is responsible for the administration of the Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement). In this capacity he gives legal advice in relation to Intellectual Property and the TRIPS Agreement to Members and Observers of the WTO and deals with TRIPS-related dispute settlement cases among WTO Members. He serves as the Secretary to the Council for TRIPS, the governing body of the TRIPS Agreement, and has previously served as the Secretary to the Special Session of the TRIPS Council, the negotiating group dealing with TRIPS negotiations under the Doha Round.
Mr. Meier-Ewert is a graduate of the University of Oxford, UK where he studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) and holds a Law degree from the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. He was a researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law in Munich, and has widely lectured on TRIPS and WTO-related matters.

Jacques de Werra, Professor of Contract Law and Intellectual Property Law at the University of Geneva, Director of the Digial Law Center
Jacques de Werra is ordinary/full professor of the law of obligations (contract law) and of intellectual property law at the Faculty of Law. He is the Director of the Digital Law Center (www.digitallawcenter.ch). He is a also member of the MIDS Committee (Master of International Dispute Settlement).
Jacques de Werra has taught as visiting professor at various leading universities abroad (Harvard Law School – January 2022 as Charles Hieken Visiting Professor in Patent Law for a course on „International Intellectual Property Transactions“, Stanford Law School, Paris 2 – Panthéon Assas, Université Catholique de Louvain, City University of Hong Kong, University of
Nagoya).
He was Vice-Rector of the University of Geneva (July 2015 – July 2019) where he was in charge of scientific information, technology transfer, relations with international organizations and the of University-wide project „Digital University“. He piloted the institutional digital strategy, which led to the adoption of the University’s digital strategy and to the implementing action plan (at
the end of 2018).

Filip De Corte is Head of Intellectual Property at Syngenta Crop Protection
Filip joined Syngenta on October 1, 2013. Before that he worked for Cargill and Johnson & Johnson. Filip has a Ph.D. in organic chemistry; he is a qualified European Patent Attorney and European Patent Litigator and passed the US patent bar exam. He also has an MBA of the Vlerick School of Management. Filip taught patent law in Antwerp as well as at the University of Leuven and lectures in the European Patent Litigator course of CEIPI in Strasbourg.