2024-02-02:
Undoubtedly, the Unified Patent Court has been a tremendous success. Since the Court’s start of operations on 1 June 2023, the Court of First Instance has received a total number of 217 cases; and up until 31 January, the Court of Appeal had already received in total 33 cases.
The 217 cases before the Court of First are subdivided as follows: in total 69 infringement actions were filed in the local divisions in Germany, 9 infringement actions were filed in Paris local division, 5 in the Nordic Baltic regional division, 3 infringement actions each in Milan and the Hague and 1 infringement action each in Helsinki and Vienna respectively.
Based on 26 infringement actions, in total 86 counterclaims for revocation were filed before all the Court’s divisions. Another 57 infringement actions were also filed, however without any counterclaim for revocation being lodged.
A total of 22 applications for provisional measures, preserving evidence and orders for inspection were filed in the divisions of the Court of First Instance.
The central divisions received in total 25 revocation actions, 21 in Paris and 4 in Munich respectively.
The 33 cases before the Court of Appeal are subdivided as follows: eleven appeals under RoP 220.1 (Appealable decisions by a party adversely affected), thirteen appeals under RoP 220.2 (Appealable decisions against other orders), three applications for an order for expedition of an appeal, two applications for suspensive effect and one request for discretionary review.
As expected, German and English are the prime languages of proceedings. Specifically, 47 % of the cases were filed in German while 43 % were filed in English. The remaining cases were filed in either French, Italian or Dutch. It is probably safe to assume that the proportion of cases in English will increase over time.
Finally, it is noted that none of the local divisions in Copenhagen, Lisbon, Ljubljana or Vienna has received any cases yet.
Text: Joakim Wihlsson