Blog

Artificial Intelligence («AI») has and will continue to have an increasing impact on our everyday lives. Although AI in general is only at its inception phase, when it comes to medicine it already has a track record in particular in terms of pattern recognition. The application of machine learning systems may even help to develop and fight the current Covid-19 crisis. At the same time, this adds to the need to find out how AI should be addressed from a legal perspective, which the European Union («EU») White Paper on Artificial Intelligence intends to outline.

On 16 April 2020, the Federal Council passed a special ordinance in relation to the Swiss insolvency and restructuring regime to protect companies who ran into financial difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic (the COVID-19 Insolvency Ordinance). The COVID-19 Insolvency Ordinance entered into force on 20 April 2020 and will remain effective for a period of six months.

The year 2020 does not only mark the beginning of a new decade but also brings a variety of changes from an employment law perspective which must be observed and implemented during the course of the year. Read here about some of the changes to employment law coming into effect in 2020.

If you have missed our event on shareholder exit and liquidity events on 27 February 2020, check out our latest LexCast on which Leti McManus (Tiger Link Advisors), Vincenzo Braiotta (Grant Thornton) and Benjamin Dürig (Froriep) agreed to share their main takeaways from the event. The podcast is moderated by Cornelia Mattig.

The novel coronavirus, which has been declared a “public health emergency of international concern” by the WHO, continues to spread. Besides China, coronavirus cases have been confirmed in more than 30 countries. The virus has now also arrived in Switzerland and as a result, employers need to be aware of the employment legal issues involved. In particular, employers need to know what to do if employees refuse to attend work through fear of contracting the coronavirus at the workplace or if employees already have the virus. A number of different scenarios are possible, which we will briefly highlight in this blog post.

In this blog, we answer some common questions and share some tips to get your patent strategy off the ground and help your startup take flight.