International Experience and Capabilities

Roy S. Gordet has exceptional personal and professional experiences that enable him to effectively work with clients from different cultures and legal backgrounds and from different countries.

First, Roy has an excellent command of Spanish, French and German, can easily converse in these languages, and has a good writing ability in these three languages.  The German language ability is a result of having studied German and lived in Munich for a year and a half while a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Copyright and Competition Law. At the Max Planck Institute, he did advanced research in copyright law and participated in workshops and discussion groups with intellectual property lawyers and scholars from many countries, and developed personal and professional relationships that continue to this day.

The French-speaking ability was gained from university level courses in French language and literature, and from having studied law one summer at the University of Strasbourg, and having lived in French-speaking environments and traveled with French-speaking people.

As for Spanish, Roy excelled in Spanish throughout high school and he took a course in contemporary Latin American poetry at the University of Michigan, a course in the history of the Spanish language at the Normal University in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico. He also traveled another summer during college throughout Mexico. During law school, Roy was a summer intern at an international law firm in Madrid. Before becoming a lawyer, he worked as a Spanish reading skills teacher for native speakers of Spanish in New York City, and he also worked part-time during law school as a Spanish-English courtroom interpreter for the Santa Clara County courts.  Over the past few years, Roy has studied Portuguese and Italian on his own, and has recently spent time in Brazil and Italy improving his language skills to the point where he has very good reading skills and moderate conversational skills.

As part of his international experience, for most of 1993, Roy was a Commercial Law Liaison for the Central and East European Law Initiative (CEELI) in Krakow, Poland.  CEELI, a program of the American Bar Association, sends US lawyers to Central and Eastern Europe, as well as to the former Soviet Republics in order to introduce lawyers in these countries to US law.  Roy worked closely with scholars from the Intellectual Property Law Institute of Jagiellonian University, as well as with local attorneys and business people in Krakow and Warsaw.

Lastly, adding to Roy’s experience in international legal matters, over the years Roy has worked with numerous foreign attorneys from countries like  Brazil, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain and Japan, on behalf of U.S. and foreign clients.