General Background

Jeremy Lack is an independent lawyer and mediator residing in Geneva, Switzerland.  He is a Door Tenant with Quadrant Chambers in London (www.quadrantchambers.com) and also serves as independent counsel to Ziegler Poncet Grumbach Carrard & Luscher, a Geneva-based law firm (www.praetor.ch) and Pearl Cohen Zedek Latzer, LLP a New York intellectual property law firm with offices in Israel (www.pczlaw.com).  Mr. Lack also acts as the Director and General Counsel of Medabiotech (www.medabiotech.com), a Swiss venture capital and consulting partnership that specializes in emerging Life Science technology companies.  He is an English Barrister registered with the New York and Geneva state bars, and works with common law and civil law matters.  He practices a broad range of international business law with special skills in intellectual property, technology development, licensing, venture capital, and Alternative Dispute Resolution.  Mr. Lack has served on the boards of several start-up companies and has worked closely with directors and their shareholders on issues of corporate governance.  Mr. Lack was born in Geneva, Switzerland and has Swiss, British, US and Israeli citizenships.  He is an accredited mediator with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the Swiss Chamber of Commercial Mediation (SCCM); the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR), the Centre de Médiation et d’Arbitrage de Paris (CMAP), the International Trademark Association (INTA), In Place of Strife (UK), and the Geneva state council (CH).   Mr. Lack is also member of the faculty at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where he teaches international IP strategies to students doing the Masters program in International Business Administration.

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Educational Background

Mr. Lack is a graduate of the International School of Geneva (CH) and Oxford University, Lincoln College (UK), from which he obtained a BA in Jurisprudence and an MA (Oxon.) in Physiological Sciences.  He qualified as an English Barrister in 1989 (Middle Temple), and was admitted to the New York State Bar in 1990, including the Southern, Eastern and Northern District Courts of New York.  He is also admitted to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and is a registered US patent and trademark attorney since 1992.  Mr. Lack holds postgraduate diplomas in European Competition law (1997) and in comparative Copyright Laws (2006) from Kings College (UK).

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Professional Background

Following his call to the English Bar and several mini-pupilages and legal internships in the UK, Mr. Lack joined the New York law firm of Fish & Neave in 1989, where he spent six years in private practice as an associate attorney, handling a broad range of intellectual property and technology-related matters.  These ranged from patent prosecution, technology transfer agreements and coordinating multi-jurisdictional intellectual property disputes between large multinationals.  He developed an interest in arbitration and mediation as a solution for resolving international commercial disputes in this sector, instead of having to rely on parallel proceedings in national courts.  He has advised on US, UK, French, German, Swiss, Dutch, Italian, and European Union proceedings.  In 1995 Mr. Lack became in-house counsel to Becton, Dickinson & Co., a leading medical devices and diagnostics company (www.bd.com).  He moved to the company’s European Headquarters in Grenoble, France as an international business attorney, with responsibilities for general corporate and commercial affairs as well as intellectual property matters for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.  He was the company’s in-house counsel for the UK, Ireland, Italy and Spain, responsible for transactions ranging from acquisitions, divestitures, distribution agreements, labour issues, and general contractual agreements.  Mr. Lack joined Medabiotech as a director and General Counsel in November of 1998, and acted as the interim CEO & General Counsel of NovImmune SA, a biotechnology spin-off company from the University of Geneva, which was managed by Medabiotech from 1999-2001.  

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Languages

Mr. Lack is fluent in English, French, Spanish and Hebrew and has a basic knowledge of Italian and German.

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Memberships & Publications

Mr. Lack is a member of the Ordre des Avocats de Genève (ODAGE, Section des avocats étrangers), of the Mediation Sub-Committee of the Practices and Standards Committee of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (CIArb, of which he is an Associate Member), and is a member of the Advisory Board to the International Mediation Institute (IMI) and the Advisory Council to the Swiss Chambers of Commerce and Industry for their Swiss Rules of Commercial Mediation (appointed by the Geneva chamber of commerce and industry).  He has been involved in several professional associations including the Licensing Executives Society (UK, US, Switzerland, France, and its European Committee), WIPO’s International Mediation Interest Group (IMIG), GRAPI/AIPPI (FR), the Bar European Group, AUTM (US), the Association of International Business Lawyers (CH), the Association Romande de Propriété Intellectuelle (CH), and the NY Intellectual Property Law Association.  Mr. Lack has served as an advisor to the European Commission on technology transfer and intellectual property and was a co-editor of the LES European Technology Transfer Manual (ed. 1999).  He lectures regularly on intellectual property and alternative dispute resolution for business executives at the University of Geneva, WIPO, IMD and the Swiss Federal Polytechnic Institute (EPFL) in Lausanne.  Recent publications and presentations include:

• The Interaction Between Arbitration and Mediation: Vision vs. Reality (written with Prof. Dr. Renate Dendorfer of Munich, Germany) Dispute Resolution International, May 2007 Vol 1 no 1, pp. 73-98 (also published in SchiedsVZ – German Arbitration Journal, C.H. Beck Verlag, Munich, July/August 2007, Vol. 4 pp. 169-224)
• Early Resolution in IP: How Mediation is Practised Elsewhere, IBC Legal Conference, London (May 2007)
• IP as a Financial Tool for SMEs and IP Enforcement as a Strategic Business Tool, WIPO SMEs Division training program (May 2007)
• Common Law v. Civil Law Cultures and Alternative Dispute Resolution, Ankara Bar Association, Turkey (April 2007)
• Deal Mediation, CIArb European Branch in cooperation with ERA, Trier (April 2007)
• National Intellectual Property Rights: the Importance of Mediation in an Increasingly Global and Technological Society, 72 Arbitration 4 (2006) pp. 325-328
• Strategic Use of Intellectual Capital: IP Audits and Leveraging IP Assets in Business Strategy, WIPO-INSME International Training Program (July 2006)
• Using IP as a Tool for Accessing Finance and Harvesting Returns From IP Assets, WIPO-INSME International Training Program (July 2006)