Özkan Seven, research assistant

Özkan Seven has been a legal trainee at the Regional Court of Essen since April 2025. He studied law at Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, where he successfully passed the first state examination in 2024.

At university he specialised in the foundations of law, in particular legal history and legal philosophy. In this context he developed a particular interest in Immanuel Kant.

Mr Seven completed his public prosecutor placement at the Essen public prosecutor's office. His administrative placement took him to the Administrative Court of Gelsenkirchen and the Westphalia public procurement tribunal.

Alongside his studies and traineeship, Mr Seven reads widely and engages with a wide range of subjects, including mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy and computer science.

In this context he has been a member of the German Mathematical Society for many years.

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In his role as a research assistant at ITMR Rechtsanwälte, from March 2026 Özkan Seven will support the team in particular in IT law, data protection law, AI law and the contractual structuring of digital business models. He is particularly fascinated by the interface between classical jurisprudence and the rapid developments of digitalisation. In his view, the increasing interlinking of legal questions with technical, mathematical and logical principles opens up entirely new perspectives for advice.

The rapid spread of artificial intelligence (AI) and generative language and image models confronts companies and public bodies with unprecedented legal challenges. Questions of intellectual property in AI-generated content, transparency obligations under the EU AI Act, liability for faulty algorithmic decisions and compatibility with data protection principles (Art. 5, 22, 35 GDPR) will keep courts and supervisory authorities busy in the coming years.

The progressive digitalisation of public administration (Online Access Act, Register Modernisation Act, electronic records) and the related public procurement implications are another focus of his interest. His practical experience at the Westphalia public procurement tribunal enables him to assess procurement procedures for IT and digitalisation projects not only from a purely legal perspective but also from a technical and organisational one.

Alongside his legal work, Özkan Seven follows the academic debates on the philosophy of the digital with great attention. How does our understanding of autonomy, responsibility and causality change when decisions are increasingly made by self-learning systems? What role do classical concepts of legal philosophy – such as Kant's categorical imperative or his theory of freedom – still play in a world in which data flows and algorithms significantly influence human behaviour? He does not see these questions as a purely academic exercise but as a necessary basis for developing future-proof legal rules.

ITMR Rechtsanwälte deliberately relies on a team that thinks across disciplines. The combination of deep legal understanding, technical affinity and a philosophically reflective background makes Özkan Seven a valuable addition. Clients benefit from the fact that he does not assess matters in legal isolation but always takes the wider technological, social and ethical context into account.

Anyone working today in cloud computing, software as a service, AI development, data trusts, cybersecurity contracts or the digital platform economy needs advisers who can realistically assess both the legal pitfalls and the technical possibilities and limits.