Seven years ago, in 2015, Asia IP visited Yangon, the commercial centre of Myanmar, for the first time, in search of Myanmar’s long-promised (and longer-awaited) suite of intellectual property laws.  

The excitement on the ground at the time was palpable: the country once known as Burma was finally free of global sanctions and was responding by loosening restrictions, reforming its currency and updating its foreign investment laws as quickly as it could, hurtling towards the 21st century at breakneck speed. 

The lede to our 2015 story confidently proclaimed that “Investors are coming to Myanmar.” We doubled down by including a modified version of that as our headline, too. Based on what lawyers in Yangon told us repeatedly, we expected the first of the country’s new IP laws to be on the books shortly, replacing common law laws that were, in some cases, more than 100 years old. 

Seven years on, the country has modern laws – trademark, industrial design and patent laws were enacted in 2019 but are not yet in force. The Central Committee of Intellectual Property Rights (CCIPR), established by the government in September 2021, has not opened yet, but is expected to do so in early 2023. 

As far as the investors go, they’ve come, sort of, despite the February 2021 military coup which has killed more than 2,300 people, according to local monitoring groups, and brought about multiple rounds of sanctions on junta officials from the European Union, the United States and others. 

Despite the ongoing civil war, stakeholders are still watching Myanmar and the eventual coming into force of its IP laws. The country lags behind its ASEAN peers, but there is a growing handful of lawyers in Yangon who do top-level, international-quality work, whom Asia IP is pleased to name to our first-ever list of Myanmar’s IP Experts.  

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 Myanmar’s IP Experts.

– GREGORY GLASS 

Myanmar’s IP Experts is based solely on independent editorial research conducted by Asia IP. As part of this project, we turned to in-house counsel in Myanmar, Southeast Asia and elsewhere around the world, as well as Myanmar-focused partners at international law firms, 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 45 years of collective experience in researching and understanding Myanmar’s legal market. 

All private-practice intellectual property lawyers in Myanmar 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 20 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.