On 5 July 2018 Parliament passed a new law that brings sweeping changes to the Working Time Act and will come into effect on 1 September 2018. The most important changes to the Working Time Act and Act on Rest Periods are summarized here.

If a managing director of a company makes payments after a substantive insolvency, they may be liable for damages under Section 25(3)(2) of the Statute on Limited Liability Companies. This does not apply to payments that comply with the duty to exercise due care and diligence of a prudent and conscientious manager even after the occurrence of substantive insolvency. Such liability will arise if there is a reduction in the company's assets which are distributable as part of the insolvent's estate because the managing director filed for insolvency late and payments were made in the meantime. The company is the party entitled to such damages.

The Supreme Court recently affirmed once more that the exemptions to the principle of exhaustion of trademark rights must be construed narrowly.

Determining whether an individual is an employee or self-employed can be risky for both the contractor and engager. Often, no one knows exactly how to qualify an individual until the national insurer claims arrears in social security payments in the wake of an audit. The parties involved hardly ever have legal certainty in advance. The Social Security Determination Act aims to change that.

Insolvency rules cover a wide range of measures from early intervention before a company gets into serious difficulties, timely restructuring to ensure that viable business parts are preserved, liquidation of assets where companies cannot be otherwise saved and finally giving a second chance to honest entrepreneurs via discharge of debt.

Claudia Csáky, head of our firm’s Intellectual Property / IP & IT practice group, authored the Chambers Global Practice Guide 2018 for Copyright in Austria.

Under Austrian law, a recommendation letter must be truthful and cannot contain language that would aggravate the professional advancement of the employee.

When truthfulness would result in less than lavish praise, employers must resort to a short-form recommendation letter, devoid of any information beyond the type of work performed and the duration of employment. This alternative, although accurate in its lack of praise, can aggravate an employee's career prospects.

Ferdinand Graf and Marija Križanac are the authors of the latest volume of the RFG-series (a publication series on law and finance for Austrian municipalities) which was recently published by MANZ (a renowned legal publishing house in Austria).

In a welcome development of Austrian copyright law, the Supreme Court recently ruled that a combination of works by two artists does not constitute a joint work if it can be separated, even if the works involved were created for the sole purpose of being combined as a jointly planned contribution. Strong indicators of whether parts of a work are separable are the individual marketability and possible depreciation of the separated parts.

The Insolvency Code was recently amended in response to the introduction of the EU Insolvency Regulation, creating – for the first time – specific rules for the insolvency of corporate groups in Austria.