Dublin’s tech pulse and the AI design frontier: an exclusive interview with John Milligan at ECTA 2026

As the European IP community gathered in Dublin for the ECTA 2026 annual conference, the atmosphere was charged with the theme of “Green Light for Growth.” Set against the backdrop of a city that hosts European headquarters for tech giants like Meta, LinkedIn, and TikTok, the event provided a perfect case study for how innovation drives brand equity.

In an exclusive interview on home turf, Dublin local and ECTA organizing committee member John Milligan of Mason Hayes & Curran LLP shared his insights into the city’s vibrant entrepreneurial spirit and the looming challenges of artificial intelligence in design law.

The AI design gap

A key highlight of this year’s conference was the direct challenge generative AI poses to traditional registered design protection. Milligan notes that while AI is “here to stay,” current legislative frameworks are still catching up. He points out a significant hurdle for practitioners:

“The EU design reform that we have going through at the minute actually doesn’t address AI either… that’s sort of left to courts to deal with these issues as they arise.”

According to Milligan, the central tensions revolve around ownership and liability. Because EU design protection requires a design to be new and have individual character, the lack of a human “designer” behind AI-generated content creates a legal vacuum regarding who truly owns the resulting IP.

The “muddy waters” of authorship

For clients navigating these “muddy waters,” Milligan emphasizes the importance of contractual protections and rigorous record-keeping. He suggests that designers must be able to prove their own creative contributions to secure protection:

“If there’s any sort of human input into the design process, we would ask [that] you try and just keep a paper record of that… because things like copyright obviously you have to show human original creativity.”

As a member of the ECTA Young Professionals group, Milligan views AI not as a replacement, but as a powerful tool that can handle “labor-intensive” tasks like clearance searches and document summaries. This shift allows the next generation of IP leaders to focus on high-level strategy and relationship-building within the “intimate family vibe” of the ECTA network.

Watch the full interview to explore how Dublin’s tech ecosystem is shaping the future of global IP law.

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