Ivo Emanuilov is our AI partner who leads the firm’s Artificial Intelligence practice. He works at the meeting point of intellectual property, technology regulation and computer science, and is one of relatively few practitioners in the region who can move fluently between the technical detail of how an AI system is built and the legal and regulatory questions that detail raises.
His practice spans the entire life of an AI system, from securing and defending intellectual property in software and AI inventions; structuring open source and open core strategies; achieving compliance with the EU AI Act, the GDPR and the wider European data framework; and allocating liability and risk in contracts and transactions. He advises developers, investors, corporates, and public sector and research organisations, equally at home counselling a start-up on what it can patent and an institution on how to govern a large-scale data sharing project.
Ivo’s regulatory work places him inside the rooms where Europe’s AI rules are being written. He is a member of the EU AI Office’s expert group on the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice and a reserve member of the European Commission’s Expert Group on Liability and New Technologies. Alongside private practice, he has acted as an expert for the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and is included in the list of experts of Directorate-General for Parliamentary Research Services of the European Parliament. He also sits on AI Chamber CEE’s Board of Advisors.
His intellectual property expertise centres on the patentability of computer-implemented and AI inventions across the EPO, the UK and the US, ie, the technical character, sufficiency and “computer program” questions that determine whether software and AI can be patented. He is completing a PhD on this subject at Utrecht University, writes regularly for the Kluwer Patent Blog, and has taught Information Law and Responsible AI at Sofia University.
Ivo’s formation bridges disciplines, with study in computer science, mathematics and law, including an LLM Intellectual Property Law from KU Leuven and a postgraduate diploma from the University of Cambridge. He advises clients across Bulgaria, Brussels and the wider EU, and works in Bulgarian and English.