A youth spent in the shadow of the Nokia Research Center in Camberley by London and a Master’s degree at Oxford turned Arttu Ahava into an anglophile with a knack for quickly absorbing new information, and a desire to understand the big picture from a business perspective. All good attributes for a starting IP lawyer.
Arttu Ahava, LLM, BA, MPhil (Oxon) started working for Berggren on 1 June 2015 as an IP lawyer. Ahava’s educational background is a mesh of three different, but interlinking fields: social and cultural anthropology, English philology and law. Ahava has managed to connect these different areas of study, providing him with a unique profile as an expert.
Understanding cultural differences and natural business-mindedness
"An interest in different cultures first made me interested in studying anthropology. However, my years in the UK gave me a very special relationship with the anglo-American way of thinking. I next turned my hand to studying English philology, and ended with a certification as an authorised translator from Finnish into English. Then gradually, partly for prosaic reasons such as job prospects and partly due to my interest in business and business strategy, I decided to go to law school, eventually graduating as a lawyer."
Arttu Ahava feels that the weekly rhythm of reading and writing at Oxford has prepared him for quickly and painlessly absorbing new information and combining it in novel ways. The ability to rapidly soak in new information, together with a broad academic background, is a strong advantage when it comes to working with intellectual property rights.
"An understanding of different cultures and native level English give me the tools to consider the contracts and intellectual property rights of a company as a whole, without forgetting the cross-border and global aspects of the market in which the company operates."
Ahava’s career path bears a certain resemblance to a start-up or growth company: building his own niche partly through careful planning and partly through strokes of luck, letting the pieces fall into place one by one.
Attraction to Berggren: full-service IP house
Arttu Ahava has been working with business law and intellectual property rights at his previous employers, Castrén & Snellman, Roschier and lately Peltonen LMR, which are all Finnish business law firms. Ahava has in particular advised start-ups and growth companies, drafting vital contracts such as NDAs, shareholders’ agreements, ICT contracts and distribution agreements, as well as providing full service business law services in the form of a part-time secondment.
At Berggren, Ahava works with IPR-related contracts and also helps with legal translations. He is developing his expertise in a broad range of IP tasks while working in Berggren’s various client teams.
"I applied because I believed the message the firm was broadcasting: in Finland, Berggren is a big and respected IPR house with a broad range of expertise in intellectual property rights. However, while Berggren is well known among businesses, it is only starting to get recognition in the legal services industry."
"I have worked fairly often with growth companies. On a high level, I am interested in our clients’ needs on a strategic level. I look forward to getting more practical experience of how IPR can be harnessed in the best possible way, which is to say strategically."
