Dr Hendrik Schöttle

Dr Hendrik Schöttle is a lawyer, certified specialist in IT law (Fachanwalt für Informationstechnologierecht) and partner at Osborne Clarke in Munich. He is regarded as a specialist in open source compliance and software licensing and has practised IT law for more than 20 years.

Hendrik advises on the legal structuring of software-driven business models, in particular on the use of open source software and on licence compliance. He also drafts software licences and IT contracts and advises on data law. His practice further covers related regulatory questions, in particular the Cyber Resilience Act and digital sovereignty. His clients include international technology groups, leading digital businesses and large companies across a range of industries.

Before entering practice as a lawyer, Hendrik worked for several years as a software developer at the Institute of Legal Informatics at Saarland University. Several secondments to the legal departments of IT companies have given him a client-side view of what matters in practice. His hands-on experience and technical background benefit clients wherever the advice touches the technology itself.

Hendrik is regularly recommended in legal rankings, including JUVE, Legal 500 and Kanzleimonitor. The JUVE Handbook has named him a leading name in open source for years.

“Exceptional expertise in the field of OSS”

– Competitor, JUVE Handbook 2025/2026 

Hendrik is a co-author of several handbooks and commentaries, particularly on software, licensing and data protection law. In the Praxishandbuch Softwarerecht (Marly, C.H. Beck) he writes the chapter on open source compliance. He also contributes to the commentary on the Creative Commons Public License (Boehm et al., Carl Grossmann), the Handbuch IT- und Datenschutzrecht (Auer-Reinsdorff/Conrad, C.H. Beck) and the handbook Daten- und Persönlichkeitsschutz im Arbeitsverhältnis (Weth/Herberger/Wächter/Sorge, C.H. Beck), among others, and has written numerous articles. He speaks regularly at conferences and runs in-house training for clients.

Hendrik is a board member of the Bitkom working group Open Source. Since the 2026/27 winter semester, he has held a teaching appointment on the legal aspects of open source software at the Faculty of Law of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. As a lecturer for the Deutsche Anwaltakademie, he teaches on the specialist lawyer course in IT law. He is a member of the Data Protection Law Committee of the German Federal Bar (BRAK), of the Information Technology Working Group of the German Bar Association (DAV) and of the German Society for Law and Computer Science (DGRI).

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