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01 July 2024
Taiwan boasts a strong legal market, thanks in part to its leading role in semiconductor and other high-tech manufacturing. The legal market in Taipei – and, indeed, elsewhere around Taiwan – is robust and competitive, giving it outsize strength for a jurisdiction with a working age population of just 16.55 million people.
Top brands around the world rely on companies in Taiwan for their technology needs – and the people of Taiwan understand just how crucial suppliers in Taiwan are for the rest of the world. In a survey aimed at consumers in Taiwan, TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) was named as Taiwan’s strongest brand as part of Campaign Asia-Pacific’s Asia Top 100 Brands research.
“It’s interesting how high a B2B supplier like TSMC has risen in a consumer survey, yet the global crisis over chip supplies after the pandemic has put the brand in the spotlight,” Minnie Wang wrote for Campaign.
The Economist reported in 2021 that TSMC controls a staggering amount of the global computer chip market. “It controls 84 percent of the market for chips with the smallest, most efficient circuits on which the products and services of the world’s biggest technology brands, from Apple in America to Alibaba in China, rely. As demand for the most sophisticated chips surges thanks to the expansion of fast communication networks and cloud computing, TSMC is pouring vast additional sums of money into expanding its dominance of the cutting edge,” the magazine reported.
It was no surprise that in 2023, TSMC retained the title of the No. 1 invention patent applicant in Taiwan, according to Taiwan’s Intellectual Property Office. TSMC filed 1,956 invention patent applications in 2023, an increase of 28 percent over 2022, making it the largest patent applicant in Taiwan for eight years running. Samsung Electronics of South Korea was the top patent applicant among foreign countries.
In May, Cheng-wen Wu, Taiwan’s new Minister of Science and Technology, told media that he was confident that the TSMC would be able to protect its proprietary technology as it expands overseas. Amid rising revenue forecasts for 2024 – the company expects growth above 20 percent for the year – TSMC has been throwing cold water on talks that it would enter into joint ventures to fuel its growth, particularly in the United States; TSMC has secured billions of dollars’ worth of grants and loans from the U.S. government as the United States tries to secure its supply of chips in the future should geopolitical relations turn difficult, or if the supply chain were to be impacted as it was during the Covid-19 era.
It is against this dynamic backdrop that we turned to IP professionals in the region in order to understand better what clients need today. Asia IP asked a large number of professionals – mostly in-house counsel and corporate legal managers – what they were looking for from their legal service providers. From their answers, we have compiled our list of 50 Taiwan IP Experts, those lawyers who understand just what their clients need and are able to provide them with the best practical advice.
Taiwan’s legal market has shown signs of fragmentation; there is more than a smattering of new and upcoming firms represented on our list. In fact, no fewer than 28 different firms account for either one or two lawyers on the list.
Tsai, Lee & Chen placed four lawyers on the list (Candy K.Y. Chen, Crystal J. Chen, Victor S.C. Lee and Jesse K.Y. Peng), while Lee and Li (Hsiu-Ru Chien, Gloria Lu and Ruey-Sen Tsai) and Rich IP & Co. (Russell Horng, Cross Liu and Chien-Chung Yuan) each placed three lawyers on the list. A total of 32 different firms placed lawyers on our list this year.
Most of the lawyers named to our list have multiple practice specialties. Many of them are litigators, while others concentrate on prosecution work or provide strategic advice.
All of them have something in common: they are experts in their fields and, in one way or another, they provide extra value for their clients. They are Asia IP’s Taiwan IP Experts.
– GREGORY GLASS
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Taiwan’s IP Experts is based solely on independent editorial research conducted by Asia IP. As part of this project, we turned to thousands of in-house counsel in Taiwan, China, elsewhere in Asia and around the world, and asked them to nominate private-practice lawyers, including foreign legal consultants, advisers and counsel.
The final list reflects the nominations received combined with the input of the editorial team at Asia IP, which has nearly 50 years of collective experience in researching and understanding the legal market in Asia.
All private practice intellectual property lawyers working at law firms in Taiwan were eligible for inclusion in the nomination process; there were no fees or any other requirements for inclusion in the process.
The names of our 50 IP Experts are published here. Each IP Expert was given the opportunity to include their biography and contact details in print and on our website, for which a fee was charged.
