News

On 13 December 2024, the new Regulation (EU) 2023/988 of the European Parliament and of the Council on General Product Safety (“GPSR”) will come into force. This regulation replaces the more than 20-year-old General Product Safety Directive (GPSD) and brings with it numerous innovations. The GPSR applies directly in all Member States of the European Union.

An employer who is concerned that an employee will compete with them after leaving the company will consider agreeing to a post-contractual non-competition clause.

For example, such a clause aims to prevent the employee from working as an employee for a competitor after the end of the employment relationship or from setting up a rival business of their own.

The requirements that the legal systems of the individual states place on the agreement, the form, and the cancellation of post-contractual non-competition clauses with employees vary greatly.

We are delighted to announce that experienced lawyers Marc Manciet and Soraya Racette will join our team in Paris as of January 1, 2025. Together with Maurice Hartmann, they will lead our Paris office, bringing extensive expertise in various areas of law.

In May 2023, Directive (EU) 2023/970 of the European Parliament and of the Council on strengthening the application of the principle of equal pay for men and women for equal work or work of equal value through pay transparency and enforcement mechanisms was adopted, and Member States are required to implement this di-rective into national law by 07/06/2026.

On 3 October 2024, the Slovak Parliament approved the government's consolidation package of changes in tax policy, most of the measures will take effect on 1 January 2025. This package brings major changes that will affect both businesses and ordinary consumers. What changes do you need to prepare for?

On 29 December 2023, the National People's Congress (the legislature of the People's Republic of China) made significant amendments to the criminal law.

This change in the law, which has meanwhile come into force, is in line with the central government's promise to sharpen the focus on lawful conduct by private companies in China and to fight corruption with all severity.

In recent months, the EU Parliament has passed a large number of ESG-related (ESG: Environmental, Social and Governance) legislative proposals. Given the speed and variety of new laws, it is important for entrepreneurs and organisations to stay informed about the latest developments in ESG legislation. Below we provide an overview of the current ESG regulatory requirements in the package of measures relating to the Green Deal and explain what companies should consider in the near future.

Since the beginning of 2022, a large number of data protection laws have been enacted in China. Since there was initially a lack of necessary concreteness and harmonisation of these laws, their specific scope and significance was difficult to estimate for foreign enterprises in China. In 2023 and 2024, there has been a large number of legal amendments and significant concretisation in data protection law.

The beginning of the year saw significant changes to corporate law. In Germany, a significant reform came into force with the Act on the Modernization of Partnership Law (MoPeG). In Austria, the catalog of company forms was expanded to include the 'flexible corporation', which has offered new opportunities for business activities since 1 January 2024. China will introduce comprehensive changes to company law from July 1, 2024, which will affect foreign investors and management in particular. There are also important developments in France, Italy, Slovakia and Turkey, which will each introduce new legal requirements and changes to the corporate environment.

Since the firm's foundation, significant strides have been made. By changing our name, we aim to emphasize our commitment to past values and achievements while simultaneously paving the way for innovative developments, streamlined structures, and a promising future.

Today, more and more business activities and professional activities are shifting to the digital world. The coronavirus pandemic has contributed significantly to this trend, as it has forced us to adapt to new realities. This situation, as well as the efficiency and convenience of remote work, has created a new working reality, which in turn brings new risks of which many of us were previously unaware. We are talking about cybercrime, which companies in particular can suffer.

With telemedicine / remote treatment, healthcare medical services are provided by means of audiovisual communication technologies over geographical or temporal distances. Telemedicine is diverse and can be provided both in regional rural care or across countries as well as in the specialised care of rare diseases or by specialists that are not available everywhere. Especially after the coronavirus pandemic, telemedicine has increased in importance.

We are pleased to announce that SAXINGER Services SE, alliance of European business law firms, has opened a new office  in Ankara. Our 230 lawyers at 32 locations in 14 countries will thus support you with international  competence, commitment and valuable local experience in every one of your projects.

GEMS Schindhelm's new office in Ankara was opened on 01.10.2023 and is headed by GEMS Schindhelm attorney at law and partner Gürkan Erdebil, LL.M. and attorney at law and partner Emre Kurt, LL.M.. Their practice focuses on IP / IT, corporate law / M&A, litigation / dispute resolution, white collar crime / compliance, real estate law, employment law, copyright & unfair competition, and aviation & transport law.

Most countries of the European Union have already transposed Directive (EU) 2019/1937 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2019 on the protection of persons who report breaches of Union law within their legal systems. There are some legal differences in how the Whistleblower Directive has been transposed into the various laws.

In the case of M&A transactions, all participants strive for a quick closing and thus legal certainty in the future. Previously, an M&A transaction was checked ex ante by the responsible competition authorities if certain turnover thresholds were exceeded to determine whether the project would create or strengthen a dominant position. However, this legal certainty is now lost due to the most recent practice and case law of the European Court of Justice (hereinafter referred to as “ECJ”), since, even if the turnover thresholds are not met, there is the possibility of an ex post content review and, if necessary, a reversal obligation.

The decision to purchase a holiday home is often made on a wave of emotion, with the exuberance of great memories of a beautiful summer holiday. But however enthusiastic you are about the beauty of your home and its area, it is important to also keep an eye on the costs in order to avoid unpleasant surprises later on leading to “buyer’s remorse”. These start with the ancillary costs of the actual purchase and can continue until the inheritance tax in the case of an inheritance.

In the following article, we review the costs you need to take into account for Italy as they occur on the purchase of the property, during its ongoing use, on its sale or transfer as a gift, or even in the event of inheritance.

The decision to purchase a holiday home is often made on a wave of emotion, with the exuberance of great memories of a beautiful summer holiday. But however enthusiastic you are about the beauty of your home and its area, it is important to also keep an eye on the costs in order to avoid unpleasant surprises later on leading to “buyer’s remorse”. These start with the ancillary costs of the actual purchase and can continue until the inheritance tax in the case of an inheritance.

In the following article, we review the costs you need to take into account for Turkey as they occur on the purchase of the property, during its ongoing use, on its sale or transfer as a gift, or even in the event of inheritance.

“Whistleblowing” describes the uncovering of abuses, such as corruption, money laundering, and environmental hazards, by whistleblowers who have acquired insider knowledge due to their professional activity. Whistleblowers must usually accept serious personal or professional disadvantages as a result of their reports.

To protect whistleblowers, the EU already issued the Whistleblowing Directive in 2019. This directive stipulates that enterprises have the obligation to establish channels and procedures to enable reports of abuses and breaches of the law.

On 12 January 2023 the Regulation (EU) 2022/2560 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 December 2022 on foreign subsidies distorting the internal market (hereinafter: the “FSR Regulation”) has entered into force.

The FSR Regulation, which will apply from 12 July 2023, equips the European Commission (hereinafter: the “Commission”) with new tools preventing distortion in competition of the internal (EU) market resulting from “foreign subsidies” meaning subsidies granted by the non-EU states to the entities operating on the internal market.

With a judgment from 2019, the ECJ had clearly set the direction: From the Working Hours Directive in conjunction with Art. 31 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (CFR), there is the obligation of the Member States to ensure that employers introduce an “objective, reliable and accessible system that can be used to measure the daily working hours worked by employees”; this follows from the right of employees to effective health protection and compliance with the legally prescribed (weekly and daily) maximum working hours. However, the ECJ had not set a specific deadline for the Member States.

Over three full years, the requirements of the ECJ then remained without any significant practical consequences, with a few exceptions that we will present below on a country-specific basis. And it was probably generally assumed that legislative intervention would be required for the practical implementation of the judgment. However, the German Federal Labour Court has now taken the ball directly and formulated directly from existing law specific obligations incumbent on the employer even without legislative measures.

The applicable e-commerce policy is over 20 years old. That is why the European Union launched a regulatory package for online platforms a few years ago.

In Slovakia, Act No. 54/2019 Coll. on the protection of whistleblowers of socially harmful activities will take effect on 1 March 2019. This new law has replaced the previous law that regulated the basic framework for the protection of whistleblowers of socially harmful activities in the Slovakia. The objective of adopting this new law was to deepen and expand whistleblower protection and make it more effective, among other things by establishing the Office for the Protection of Whistleblowers, expanding the concept of serious socially harmful activity, amending the concept of reporting, clarifying the regulation of the protection granted, etc.

The development and commercialisation of drones is making relentless progress. Due to the wide range of applications and the rapid technical advances, unmanned aircraft – or “UAS” (=Unmanned Aircraft System) for short – are predicted to be a promising future.

The Slovak Labour Code explicitly stipulates the employer's obligation to maintain evidence of working hours, overtime, night work, and active and inactive times of on-call time for all employees. The evidence must record the start and end of the period in which the employee performed work or had an ordered or agreed on-call service.

In case of a hacking attack, unauthorised attackers attempt to access external PCs, notebooks, smartphones, tablets or even entire corporate networks. Since the frequency of such attacks has increased massively in Europe over the past year, in this article we look at the successful hacker attack from the outside, which encrypts the affected systems in such a way that the company can no longer access its system at all.

The European Commission’s Vertical Block Exemption Regulation (“VBER”), which was previously potentially applicable to distribution, whereby agreements between manufacturers or suppliers and retailers are exempt from the ban on cartels, ceased to be in force on 31/05/2022, because the original period of validity of 12 years was reached.
These new versions bring some changes which relax requirements compared to the previous legal situation, but also tighten requirements, which primarily take into account the area of tension between online/offline sales.

Cryptocurrency, big data, artificial intelligence, data theft, cloud, virtual, augmented, or mixed reality, cyber warfare, telemedicine, social media, autonomous driving, Industry 4.0, Criminal Law 4.0, NFTs – these are not the only issues that are bringing about the era of the fourth so-called digital revolution. Each of these digital changes is bringing new challenges to all facets of society – the link between law and technology is one of the biggest. An example that illustrates the special relationship between legal and digital technologies very well are NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

The "current turning point" in connection with the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine has not only a political but also perhaps an even greater economic dimension. The sharp rise in the price of raw materials and energy has led to a dramatic increase in costs for companies. The interruption of supply chains often causes production downtimes in industry. Despite all the harmonisation of laws that has taken place in the last 20 to 30 years, especially in the European legal sphere, this issue has remained untouched by efforts at legal standardisation. The reason for this was apparently a lack of topicality. Therefore, with this article, we provide an overview of how this topic is handled legally with regard to three key questions in the respective countries of our partner law firms.

In Slovakia, the European regulation has been in force since 2021 but has not been implemented to date. The current legal requirements in Slovakia in this area are therefore not identical to current EU legislation.

Already in 2020, the European Commission presented the draft for a new EU regulation on a single market for digital services, through which the latest developments in the field of digital services are to be incorporated and regulated at EU level. The proposal aims at better protection of consumer rights in the digital environment and at the joint internal market-related enforcement potential of the EU Member States.

We are pleased to announce that SAXINGER Services SE, alliance of European business law firms, has opened a new office in Bodrum. Our 230 lawyers at 31 locations in 14 countries will thus support you with international competence, commitment and valuable local experience in every one of your projects.
 

On 16 February 2022, the National Council of Slovakia adopted Law No. 71/2022 Coll. amending Law No. 185/2015 Coll. on Copyright as amended (the “Copyright Act”). The objective of the amendment is to implement Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on copyright into Slovak law. The basic protection of copyright (and thus the protection of authors of works against computer piracy) in criminal law is regulated by Act No. 300/2005 Coll., the Criminal Code.

We are pleased to announce that SAXINGER Services SE, alliance of European business law firms, has opened a new office in Imola. Our 230 lawyers at 30 locations in 14 countries will thus support you with international  competence, commitment and valuable local experience in every one of your projects.

The contact restrictions introduced to contain the coronavirus pandemic have led to considerable upheavals in legal practice in many European Union countries. In particular for the areas of forensic activity and the creation of notarial documents, the irrevocable principle of attendance in person has continued to apply practically without restriction disregarding the progress in communication made possible by progressing digitalisation - whether it is to be able to get a personal picture of the parties (court proceedings), whether it is to confirm the personal identity of the persons appearing without doubt (notarial documents).

Until recently, the digitalisation of the justice system in the Czech Republic had no priority. However, the coronavirus pandemic has required a change in the current procedure both in court matters and in notarial matters. The necessary amendments to the law have already been made, but have not been applied in practice yet; the digitalisation of justice is expected to be completed by 2024.

Together with its cooperation partners in the UK, the Schindhelm Alliance has an international team of lawyers with many years of experience in supporting international companies in the UK market and who develop effective tailor-made solutions to all Brexit-related legal issues.

On 01.01.2020 the new location of Schindhelm Rechtsanwaltsgesellschaft mbH has opened its doors in Frankfurt. The head of the new office in the German commercial metropolis is Schindhelm counsel and partner Dr. Karolin Nelles LL.M.

According to Sec. 1118 ABGB (Austrian Civil Code), the lessor can terminate a lease unilaterally prematurely if the lessee makes a “considerably detrimental use” of the leased object. The scope and content of these legal provisions is a constant source of discussion. The mere performance of structural alterations by the lessee without the consent of the lessor does not in itself justify a good cause for the termination of the lease.

State and corporate compliance obligations to combat money laundering and terrorist financing remain an utmost priority for EU member states. Companies (“legal entities”) have therefore been obliged to disclose their “beneficial owners”, among other things, for quite some time. In Austria, a separate database - the “Beneficial Owners Register” - was set up for this purpose. In course of the implementation of the 5th EU Money Laundering Directive, further tightening measures have now been adopted.

The new “Law on Trade Secrets” now implements the so-called “EU Trade Secrets Directive”. This adopts the European legal requirements for the protection of confidential know-how and secret business information. Moreover, the new legal provisions contain limitation periods and important procedural provisions for the protection of trade secrets in court proceedings.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) recently ruled on the long-discussed question of whether and how website operators can integrate the Facebook Like button (so-called “social plug-in”) in accordance with data protection requirements.Th ECJ’s investigation results from a legal dispute between the Consumer Association of North Rhine-Westphalia and a subsidiary of Peek & Cloppenburg KG.

A new law on company crises has significantly changed the rules applicable to limited liability companies in this respect Among other things, the liability of the company’s management was tightened. Furthermore, the tasks of the supervisory body were expanded. The reform’s true impact remains to be seen: Will there be a change in corporate culture or will there be an increase in corporate crises?

“Whistleblower” - people who point out violations of the law - will be protected even more in the future. This is the aim of a new law that came into force a few months ago. The new regulation adds to already existing provisions on the protection of whistleblowers in the employment relationship.

State aid is granted on the basis of various criteria. The region or the economic sector in which the investment is made is decisive, but also the strategic importance of the investment and the level of the investment volume. Investments in structurally weak regions receive higher subsidies than investments in industrial areas. For the award of grants, a distinction is made between six different regions.

Justified by the goal of solving legal disputes in a fast and economical manner without filing lawsuits and thus relieving the overloaded Turkish courts, a mediation procedure is implemented as a mandatory pre-condition for filing a lawsuit according to Turkish labour and commercial law.

Companies invest in know-how, from which there are important competitive advantages. Valuable information is the currency of the knowledge-based company. Maintaining confidentiality of business secrets is therefore a management instrument for competitiveness and research innovations. The loss of secrets can result in serious consequences, in particular, and generally can no longer be reversed.

In the budget planning for 2019, companies should prepare for the expected increase in Po-lish labour costs.

The EU Directive on the regulation of confidential know-how and business information (know-how directive) was implemented in Hungary in July 2018.

When a new shareholder list must be submitted in the commercial register due to a change, it must satisfy the requirements of § 40 I GmbHG [Limited Liability Companies Act] in the version of 23/06/2017 according to the decision of the BGH [Federal Supreme Court] dated 26/06/2018 – II ZB 12/16.

If a Gmbh makes payments after it becomes insolvent, the Managing Directors are personal-ly liable vis-à-vis the company, regardless of the internal allocation of responsibilities.

With the large-scale reform of the company law from the year 2003, Italian legislators had simplified the regulations on the Governance of limited liability companies.

Nestlé is a holder of a 3D EU trademark that corresponds to the "KitKat" bar marketed by it and protects its design.

Throughout Europe, approximately 80% of smartphones are equipped with the Google oper-ating system, Android...

At the end of 2017, in the legal case C-42/17, the ECJ issued a much publicised decision on the question of the primacy of application of Community Law.

In view of the rapid growth of online trade, the Chinese government adopted the first e-commerce law on the comprehensive regulation of online business on 31/08/2018, which will enter into force on 01/01/2019.

Since May 2014, ownership rights for land and soil can only be acquired by natural and legal persons who have resided or been established in Bulgaria for longer than five years.

The presidential decree no. 32 issued on 12/09/2018 to protect the value of the Turkish cur-rency ("Decree") sets the limitation of foreign currency and foreign currency indexed contracts and stipulates that these contracts must be converted within 30 days into Turkish Lira (“TL”).

In the Czech Republic, as of 01/07/2019, employees should already be entitled to sick leave from the first day of their inability to work.

Due to the low unemployment rate in Slovakia, employers have recently been confronted with a lack of available workers.

In Romania, law no. 190/2018, and thus the national implementation of the GDPR, took effect as of 31/07/2018. In comparison with other EU countries, law no. 190/2018 was rather short.

In the business world, situations often arise in which the only existing managing director wants to leave the company.

The electronic transmission of tenders in the award procedure is nothing new and was already standardised in the Federal Procurement Act 2006 both for the classical area and for the area of sector contractors.

As in the past, in the case of company sales, the seller has repeatedly neither paid salaries due nor paid social security contributions due for employees, the Bulgarian Commercial Code was amended accordingly by three successive amendments in December 2017, February and March 2018.

International business transactions often involve cross border transfer of personal data. This is the case for instance where the data is stored on a server located in a third country (a country outside the EEA) or a third country IT service provider has access to the data processed by a company within the EU. If personal data is to be transferred to a third country specific provisions of the GDPR will apply.

As of 25 May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduces harsh sanctions for data breaches with extended scope of applicability.Companies and other data processing entities become potential subjects not only to the data subjects’ claims for damages, the enforceability of which has been enhanced, but also to increased administrative fines to be imposed by supervisory authorities.

The General Regulation on Data Protection (GDPR) which will apply from 25th May 2018, introduces the position of the Data Protection Officer (DPO).The DPO shall be the contact person for and shall be involved in all data protection related issues of the given entity. The DPO is an organ within the company which liaises with the authority, the company and the data subjects.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) adopted by the EU Parliament in 2016 provides a higher standard of protection of personal data for EU citizens. The GDPR will have direct effect in all member states as of May 25, 2018 and it will affect businesses all around the world that are engaged in activities with individuals in the EU.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) adopted by the EU Parliament in 2016 provides a higher standard of protection of personal data for EU citizens. The GDPR will have direct effect in all member states as of May 25, 2018 and it will affect businesses all around the world that are engaged in activities with individuals in the EU.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) adopted by the EU Parliament in 2016 provides a higher standard of protection of personal data for EU citizens. The GDPR will have direct effect in all member states as of May 25, 2018 and it will affect businesses all around the world that are engaged in activities with individuals in the EU.