Dr Fabian Schaefer advises large and medium-sized enterprises in the IT sector on questions regarding national and international agreements, outsourcing transactions, data protection and IT-related copyright. Furthermore, Dr Schaefer is specialised in questions on open source software licences and advises enterprises and public authorities in this regard. In particular, Dr Schaefer advises on questions relating to the compliance with open source software licences, their compatibility with commercial business models and the implementation of licence compliance management systems.

Before Dr Schaefer joined Bird & Bird in 2009, he worked as a lawyer close to Freiburg from 2004 to 2007 and later in the Intellectual Property/ IT practice group of Beiten Burkhardt.

From 2005 to 2007 Dr. Schaefer worked as research scholar at the Institute for Information Law of the university of Karlsruhe. His doctoral thesis concerned the viral effect of open source licences.