Practice areas
Bernd Fiten advises on privacy and data protection law (GDPR), e-commerce law, intellectual property law (copyright and trademarks) and general commercial law. He also assists clients with drafting and negotiating various types of IT contracts.
Bernd assists both data controllers and processors in complying with their obligations under European and Belgian data protection legislation (including GDPR, e-Privacy Directive, NIS Directive, etc.), including:
- advising on the correct qualification under the GDPR (controller, joint controller or processor),
- advising on the application of the correct legal basis and the processing of sensitive personal data (health data, biometric data, etc.),
- setting up and maintaining related registers, such as the register of processing operations, image processing operations and data breaches,
- assessing whether a data breach should be notified and, if so, how and to whom (supervisory authorities and/or data subjects),
- advising on transfers of personal data outside the EU and advising on the implementation of appropriate safeguards for such transfers; and
- drawing up both internal and external policy documents, including privacy policies, cookie policies, an internal data protection policy, procedures on data subjects' requests, how to act in the event of a possible data breach, etc.
Bernd assists companies (start-ups, SMEs and multinationals) and governments to assess and improve their compliance efforts, including by conducting audits and providing training on privacy and data protection. For governments, Bernd draws up protocol agreements and advises on the protocol obligation and electronic administrative data traffic.
In addition, Bernd has extensive experience in related domains such as electronic communication, electronic signatures, cookies and similar technologies, direct marketing, social media, image and portrait rights, biometrics, surveillance cameras and labour law aspects thereof, legislation on the electronic identity card, the National Register (authorisations), the security and protection of critical infrastructures, access to public information and open data, etc.
Professional admissions
Bernd has been a member of the Dutch-Speaking Bar Association of the Brussels Bar since 2016.
Bernd is also a teaching assistant at CiTiP (KU Leuven).
Education
- Master in Intellectual Property and ICT Law, University of Leuven (2016) - cum laude
- Law degree, University of Leuven (2015) - cum laude
