After graduating from Istanbul University Faculty of Law, İlhami Güneş earned his master’s degree in public law at Dokuz Eylül University’s Institute of Social Sciences, writing his thesis on “Distinctive Signs and Priority in Trademark Law”. After his pupillage he served as a judge from 1989 to 2020, spending his last 17 years before retirement as an Intellectual and Industrial Property Rights judge. He is now a lawyer registered with the İzmir Bar Association.
Selected with seven colleagues under the “Effective Enforcement of Intellectual and Industrial Property Rights” project run jointly by the Turkish Ministry of Justice and the European Union, he attended the European Patent Office’s “Advanced Intellectual Property Law” programme at the IP law departments of leading European universities. Fluent in English, he served as a member-state representative on the European Patent Office’s Enlarged Board of Appeal from January 2009 to 2013.
He has given presentations on Turkish trademark and patent law at training events organised by the German IRZ Foundation in Munich, Düsseldorf and Berlin. He is the author of practice books on copyright, intellectual property and unfair competition, trademark law, and patent and utility model law, as well as many refereed and non-refereed articles.
