Our Scholars 2022 – Sergiy Barbashyn

Your current occupation and country of work?
My name is Sergiy Barbashyn and I am an intellectual property attorney at law, managing partner at Trustme Law Firm, owner of Sergiy Barbashyn Law Office, and lecturer at the Higher School of Advocacy in Ukraine.

How you use European law in your work?
I live in Kyiv, but currently, I am staying in Portugal. For more than 11 years, I have worked with IP and IT law, helping my clients with issues such as trademark registration, copyright protection, drafting contracts, litigation, etc. My clients are brand owners, IT companies, small and medium manufacturers, and services companies located in Ukraine and worldwide.
Most of all, I work with IT, gaming, and the creative industries, but I also remain open to new experiences and challenges. My clients are in European countries such as Portugal, Poland, and Spain, as well as from Brazil and the USA. Also, I feel responsible for making a big move in protecting intellectual property in Ukraine, and I want to continue to be useful to my clients who were forced to move to other European countries and want to protect their intellectual property there. Regularly, I participate as a speaker in different conferences and projects. For example, last month, I was a speaker at an event with my colleagues dedicated to protecting IP for startups.

How you benefitted from the scholarship and the gained knowledge?
To my mind, it is today's world of rapid speed changes, and it is essential to keep abreast, strive for knowledge and move with the times. I will kindly recommend the Summer Course on European Intellectual Property Law to my friends and colleagues as a source of helpful information and highly-skilled lecturers. The knowledge gained during the course will help me to be a professional in my sphere and provide services based on up-to-day information.
Thanks to ERA European Intellectual Property Course, I have gained knowledge and now can globally analyse the situation. I found practical knowledge valuable regarding patent law and litigation in Europe, international market rules in the context of Europe, and cross-border enforcement. It was a great chance to visit the European Court of Justice.
It was a great pleasure to meet all of you and productively spend time. Thank you for the detailed organisation, care, and support. Please accept my deepest gratitude for the scholarship and contribution towards accommodation expenses, which means a lot to me.