The importance of competition law has been constantly growing over the last decades and is of relevance to all practitioners in commercial law. The competition law course combines legal and economic analysis in covering anti-competitive agreements and practises, the control of market dominance, merger control and the enforcement of competition law in the EU member states.

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Real-world markets depart in many ways from the textbook ideal of perfect competition. Industrial organization is thus devoted to the theoretical and empirical analysis of imperfectly competitive markets. As such, it provides the economic underpinnings for competition law and policy. The course develops the framework and provides the tools for the economic analysis of antitrust cases. Topics are collusion, horizontal and vertical restrictions of competition, abuse of dominance, and mergers.

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Legal aspects of corporate governance primarily concern the (executive) directors’ fiduciary duties as well as the tasks and rights of those who are in charge of the control of the management (non-executive directors, members of the supervisory board, shareholders). The course focuses on corporate governance in stock corporations and considers in detail the German Corporate Governance Code. As the course takes a comparative approach, recent trends in the U.S. and in the U.K. also are taken into account.

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Corporate governance addresses primarily the control of corporation management in the interest of stakeholders (or more particularly shareholders), but also extends to other legal forms of enterprises. The control can be executed by various means, such as financial markets, legal frameworks and their execution or self-binding codes of conduct. Control systems vary between nations. Thus, the German and U.S. systems of corporate governance form the core of this course. Other systems are also touched upon.

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Patent law determines to what extent technical innovations may be used and monopolized by one person or company in exclusion of others. This course examines how patents are obtained, maintained, licensed and enforced under German law. Although emphasis is placed on German law, international legal rules are addressed too. One feature of the course is a five hour workshop on licensing together with an experienced lawyer from Berlin.

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Intellectual property (IP; especially patents and trade marks) has become a major driver of competitive advantage in many industries. Students in this course learn how to manage IP in order to maximize its impact on business performance. The course illustrates how information from patent data can be used for multiple strategic planning purposes; e.g. competitor monitoring, R&D management, external acquisition of technological know-how and human resource management in R&D. Case studies illuminate the corporate experience in the use of patent information for strategic business planning purposes.

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For foreign companies doing business in Germany, Labor and Employment Law issues are of great importance in their daily business. Handling HR topics adequately is often very difficult for managers and even lawyers from abroad since there are various particularities in German Labor and Employment Law which differ significantly from the relevant regulations in other jurisdictions, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries. The purpose of the course is to provide an overview on the most important aspects of German as well as European Labor and Employment Law, which shall be illustrated from a manager’s point of view. The course covers the entire stages of the employment relationship from the hiring process until its termination and also focuses on works council representation and collective bargaining issues.

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The fundamental objective of this course is to help students develop managerial leadership skills. The course provides an introduction to selected key topics regarding the management of organizations at three levels: individual level, team level, and organizational level. Using important models and concepts of organization management science, students analyze human behavior in organizational settings as well as organizational processes and systems.

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The Trade Law course examines some of the legal systems that govern international economic transactions and relations. These systems range from informal collaboration by domestic regulators across international boundaries to much more elaborate international organizations created by treaty. In particular, we study the international trade regime, including the multilateral rules promulgated by the World Trade Organization.

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The course covers trade and related foreign direct investment issues. After an initial examination of globalization, the rationale of international trade is investigated.  Subsequently, the effects of trade policies, the response of international business and the role of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are discussed.  The last part of the course focuses on the reasons for foreign direct investment, the policies in this area, and the resulting business implications for foreign direct investment.

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The course on Trademark Law gives an inside view on national, European and international trademark law. Alongside basic principles concerning trademark acquisition and infringement, more specific topics such as anti-counterfeiting and grey-market controlling for goods in transit will be discussed. The course particularly focuses on the case law of the European Court of Justice and the development of the Community trademark.

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Services are increasingly important for the economic growth in developed countries. However, traditional marketing for products fundamentally differs from services marketing. Due to the intangibility of services buyers are often ill-equipped to asses their quality. The more complex the services, the more important the physical evidence and the reputation of the company and the people providing it. This course discusses the characteristics of services compared to products and the implications for services marketing. Quality, capacity and time aspects of services as well as the price determination, communication of services and their delivery are addressed.

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The course will investigate the reasons and origins for securities regulation and will analyse and discuss the current regulatory schemes in Germany, the European Union and the U.S. Among the topics covered are the regulation and the process of the issuance of new securities, disclosure requirements of listed companies, take-over regulation and the rules concerning trading on the security exchanges, such as concepts of fraud on the market. A further topic will be the supervision of the securities markets as currently organised and the international cooperation between the market supervisors. The course will attempt to not only focus on current rules and regulations, but also will give an economic analysis of such rules.

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This course addresses the principles of corporate finance. The course starts with a description of the prototype financial systems (control vs. arm’s-length), their functioning, and their major players. Following a discussion of the main corporate governance mechanisms and whether they impact firm value, the course proceeds by studying the Miller-Modigliani (M&M) capital structure irrelevance theorem and extends the analysis to include information asymmetries and agency costs to arrive at statements about firm value maximizing financial policies. Finally, the impact and information content of payout policies, i.e., dividend payments and share repurchases, is considered.

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