Our scholars 2022 – Anabela Anastasova

Your current occupation and country of work?
My name is Anabela Anastasova. I live and work in Sofia, Bulgaria, as an attorney-at-law (a member of the Sofia Bar Association), an Industrial Property Representative at the Bulgarian Patent Office and a mediator to the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Bulgaria concerning collective management disputes and multinational digital licenses.

How you use European law in your work?
To protect the IP rights of my clients successfully, to participate actively in their local business initiatives and in different public consultations on specific IP issues, I have to be familiar with the EU legislation and its principles in IP. Moreover, I should be prepared to put them into practice. This requires attending and passing training and educational programmes such as the summer school of ERA in Trier.
The success of my communication with local courts and patent offices depends on the acquired qualifications in EU law as well.
Prior knowledge of the essential IP aspects of the EU law is of huge importance to the mediation procedures between the arguing right holders and the consumers of the copyright material, which take place in my professional life.

How you benefitted from the scholarship and the gained knowledge?
Considering the before mentioned aspects, I find the Summer Course on European Intellectual Property Law organised by ERA extremely useful.

I am impressed by the lecturer’s expertise and the precise choice of IP topics presented during the course. The whole course programme and its practical performance fulfilled my professional expectations completely.

As the training and events organised by ERA are currently the only significant source of information for Bulgarian legal practitioners to obtain extensive EU IP education, I feel really happy and privileged to be one of ERA’s scholars for this course.

I am sure that the paper and digital materials obtained during the course will allow me to keep my EU IP legal knowledge up-to-date for a long time and will help me in my future work as an active legal practitioner.

I would also like to thank the management of VIENNA HOUSE EASY in Trier for their excellent services during my stay in the hotel and ERA for their support with the accommodation costs. You both made this educational endeavour possible, and your social programme allowed me to establish and grow my new professional network.