Yves (Yao-Hui) Chang

What inspired you to pursue a career in IP law?

The field of IP law covers technically complex yet fascinating projects; it also requires mixing the legal skillset with other skills in technology, business and the arts. Therefore, I believe it is a challenging career and I especially enjoy the great sense of accomplishment that it offers me. The most rewarding aspects of my job include becoming familiar with the legal process and interacting with clients, listening to them and figuring out how to best protect their inventions through IP rights.

You are known for your particular expertise in electrical engineering – how do you expect the Asia-Pacific landscape in this area to evolve in the next five years?

With the development of technology, demand for the IT and energy industries is increasing drastically. As far as I am concerned, we will see new trends in AI applications, the clean energy market, the transformation from new energy systems to the power grid and low-carbon and zero carbon energy technologies.

What are some of the most common errors that foreign rights holders make when trying to prosecute patents in the region – and how can they avoid these?

Foreign rights holders may get confused due to differences in patent regulations and practices. We explain these differences to them and provide appropriate responses on a case-by-case basis.

Which of your matters or deals has been the most memorable – and why?

Patent M580668 was approved by the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office on 25 January 2019. However, an invalidation action against Claims 1 to 3 and 5 to 6 was decided on 14 December 2020. We helped our client (the patentee) successfully file an appeal – following which the IP Court decided to withdraw the invalidation action.

How do you measure the success of a patent filing strategy?

Since a patent is a valuable commercial tool and an important investment in technology for many businesses, its protection is crucial for people, research institutions and companies. We hope that our clients’ creative ideas or products can be safeguarded by comprehensive patent protection; the pursuit of this offers us opportunities to help develop other countries’ IP services.

Our firm now provides a one-stop service for global IP rights services. We believe that customer feedback is essential to ensure that we provide the best service for clients, so we offer questionnaires for each case, the feedback from which we carefully review to improve our work.