Bird & Bird

The firm: Bird & Bird is an international law firm, with a long-established reputation for having a rare and invaluable grasp of strategic commercial issues. The firm combines exceptional legal expertise with deep industry knowledge and refreshingly creative thinking, to help clients operating at the forefront of their industries to achieve their commercial goals.

Bird & Bird has over 1,400 lawyers and legal practitioners with broad advisory transactional and contentious capability, with a particular focus on key industry sectors. The firm has an extensive international reach with 32 offices across Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, offering a seamless, cross-border service between locations and sector and practice groups.

The Belgian office, which brings together 40 lawyers from more than ten different countries, offers expert advice across a broad range of areas including corporate, commercial, competition, employment, privacy and data protection, intellectual property, regulatory and tax. The team has strong expertise in the life sciences, electronics, technology and communications, aviation and aerospace, energy, and food and beverage sectors. Furthermore, the Belgian office is also the hub of Bird & Bird’s international competition and EU practice.

Located in Brussels, the heart of the European decision-making community, the firm is able to closely follow and influence the developments of European law, particularly in its chosen sectors. This enables it to keep its clients abreast of key developments in EC law.

Areas of practice: Underpinned by deep client and industry knowledge, the firm’s key sectors include:

Automotive: advising on all stages of a life cycle of a motor vehicle, from initial design, to sales and distribution, through to disposals.

Aviation, aerospace, defence and security: advising on asset management and financing, civil aviation matters, including airlines, regulatory and competition issues, and aerospace and defence, including PPP/PFI and product liability.

Electronics: advising clients operating in or serving the electronics industry, from R&D and component manufacturing, to technology licensing agreements.

Energy and utilities: advising large multinationals, investors, project companies and large energy consumers on electricity generation, energy trading, renewable energy, cleantech and climate change, and upstream oil and gas.

Financial services: advising global clients in the financial services sector, such as global retail and investment banks, investors and hedge funds, on transactions, regulatory issues, commercial contracts and dispute resolution.

Food and beverage: advising on a full range of areas, including branding, labelling, health claims, fair trade and patents on novel foods.

Life sciences and healthcare: advising clients in biotechnology, bioinformatics and pharmaceutical companies on licensing and drug development agreements, R&D collaboration, IP acquisitions and joint ventures.

Media and entertainment: advising clients from across the media spectrum on a wide range of issues, including exploitation across all forms of digital media and emerging areas, such as user-generated content exploitation.

Sports: advising clients such as national and international sports governing bodies, event organisers and sponsors on issues including exploitation of commercial rights, brand management, regulatory and disciplinary issues.

Technology and communications: advising on matters ranging from smaller innovative projects to some of the largest, most complex and ground-breaking transactions and disputes of recent years. Its team includes lawyers with a particular focus on communications, devices and components, digital tech and eCommerce, and software and services as well as a number of more specialist industries including data centres, postal and satellites.