Cohausz & Florack

Intellectual Property / Patent Attorney

Dr. Natalie Kirchhofer is a European and German patent attorney and an expert in the fields of (bio)chemistry, pharmaceuticals and life sciences. As a partner at COHAUSZ & FLORACK, she advises German and international chemical and pharmaceutical companies and biotech start-ups on all questions of intellectual property rights. Clients benefit in particular from her strategic advice, analytical skills, sharp-mindedness and talent for arguing cases at oral proceedings. Natalie Kirchhofer has already successfully conducted many litigation proceedings (in particular high stakes EPO opposition and German nullity proceedings), in which she attacked or defended valuable patents for a number of well-known companies in the chemical and pharmaceutical industry. She has become an expert in supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) and is also active as an author and lecturer in chemical and pharmaceutical patent law.

Darüber hinaus ist sie als Co-Counsel, Schiedsrichterin oder Gutachterin in nationalen und internationalen Schiedsverfahren oder anderen ADR-Verfahren tätig, insbesondere in Angelegenheiten, die komplexes geistiges Eigentum (z.B. Patente) und wissenschafts- oder technologiebezogene Angelegenheiten betreffen, einschließlich Streitigkeiten, die sich aus F&E- oder Lizenzverträgen ergeben. In all diesen Bereichen kann sie auf ihre umfangreiche Erfahrung zurückgreifen, über die sie als ausgewiesene Patentrechtsexpertin, IP-Strategieberaterin, IP-Prozessanwältin und führende Beraterin bei transaktionsbegleitenden IP-Due-Diligences verfügt.

Since the end of 2014 Natalie Kirchhofer has been a patent attorney with COHAUSZ & FLORACK, where she complements the firm's Chemistry, Pharma and Life Sciences team. Effective January 1, 2018, she was promoted to partner.

After her training in intellectual property law at COHAUSZ & FLORACK, the Distance University of Hagen, CEIPI, the German Patent and Trademark Office and the Federal Patent Court in Munich as well as a clerkship with the honorable Dr. Thomas Kühnen, presiding judge of one of the patent infringement senates at the Higher Regional Court Düsseldorf, she was admitted with distinction as a German and European patent attorney in 2014. She then joined the IP Litigation Practice Group of Ropes & Gray LLP in New York for six months, where she gained hands-on experience in US patent litigation and also took the US Patent Bar Exam. After her return to COHAUSZ & FLORACK, she gained inhouse-experience through a 12-months part-time secondment in the patent department of a major German chemical and pharmaceutical company.

Her biochemistry studies as one of the youngest students at the University of Tübingen were supported by a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation. Through a Fulbright scholarship, she completed an academic research year with Nobel Prize winner Prof. Günter Blobel at Rockefeller University, New York. She then completed her doctorate on DNA double-strand break repair in eukaryotes at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich as a Boehringer Ingelheim Fund scholarship holder.

German, English and French

Patentanwaltskammer, epi, GRUR, FICPI, VPP, German-American Lawyer Association, women in IP e.V., Fulbright Alumni, Alumni of the German National Academic Foundation