Our History
Our firm had its beginnings in 1934, when it was founded by Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Ing. Hermann Fecht in Berlin as a patent law firm. It was relocated to Wiesbaden in 1948. Dipl.-Ing. Paul-Günther Blumbach became one of the firm’s first partners in 1965, known today as patentConsult. In 2003, patentConsult merged with the patent law firm of Dr. rer. nat. Horst Zinngrebe, located in Darmstadt. Blumbach Zinngrebe, with offices in both cities, has developed a reputation for quality as well as for its ability to effectively address its clients’ needs.
Our attorneys are specially trained in a wide variety of technological arts and they handle numerous types of inventions. Our firm focuses specifically on electrical engineering, medical devices as well as on mechanical and process engineering.
In 1956, the American inventors John Bardeen and Walter Brattain along with William Shockley were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in the field of transistor technology. Our firm prosecuted German patents DE 966 492 B and DE 814 487 B for these groundbreaking inventions.
In addition to prosecuting patents and trademarks, we have a reputation for enforcing intellectual property rights in litigation and nullity proceedings.
Our firm represented Deutsche Telekom AG between 2001 and 2010 in patent litigations against QPSX Europe GmbH, at that time a subsidiary of QPSX Communications Ltd., Australia. The subject of the dispute was a patent infringement claim concerning Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) telecommunication networks; the ITU Standards I.363.3 and I.363.5 had allegedly been violated. The QPSX patent threatening our client’s interests was revoked.
In further, we supported Deutsche Telekom AG between 2007 and 2011 during various litigations against CIF Licensing LLP, a General Electric subsidiary, on DSL technology patent issues. Considered to be one of the most complex patent disputes in Germany, the case was successfully resolved.
During nullity appeal proceedings in 2012 our law firm was able to defend a medical technology patent due to the therapy device’s mobile embodiment (BGH/Federal Supreme Court X ZR 88/09, “Electron Beam Therapy System”, GRUR/German Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property 2012, 475.)
With the decision of January 3, 2013 by the OLG Dusseldorf (I-2 U 22/10 - umbrella), we were able in favor of the defendant to significantly further develop with the case-law relating to patent-law equivalence, following the initial Supreme Court decision “occlusion device”. The OLG followed our argument that an equivalent infringement is precluded if the main claim of the patent in suit only picks up one of two different variants of an acknowledged prior art document and the embodiment in suit however, is based on the other variant.
By citing “Beauty-Tox” EU trademark infringement in 2016 before the Frankfurt am Main Higher Regional Court, we were successfully able to obtain a Europe-wide ban on the use of the names “Beautytox” and “Beautétox” along with a right to information and damage claims in several European countries. The decision, which was published in the “German Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property” 2016 (GRUR), 817, in “Pharmaceutical Law” 2016 (PharmR), 250, in “German Trademark Law” 2016 (MarkenR), 325, in “Data Base of Guiding Principles” 2016 (LSK), 180454 (Ls.), and in “BeckRS Online Legal Data Base” 2016, 077669, also appears in numerous publications (Beck Online Commentary, Article 1, Union Trademark Regulation, recital 13 and recital 27a, Dr. M. Kochendorfer in GRUR 2016, 778, GRUR-RR 2016, 481). In addition, it became part of the discussion held in the context of the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) decision dated January 12, 2017 on the subject of the right to information in a limited number of EU countries.