The Unified Patent Court (UPC) Webinar Series: Part Three

View the recording here

When the UPC opened its doors for business on June 1st, 2023, no one could really predict what this would mean for patent rights holders or the lawyers representing them.

Bird & Bird’s international patent team has been present in the courts since the first week and has been compiling its learnings from day one. During the third instalment of our regular UPC update webinars, we took an in-depth look at the last 3 months of the UPC - including preliminary objections, preservation of evidence (seizures), claim construction before the UPC, as well as some other general stats on cases and language of proceedings.

If you'd like to watch the recording, please click the button above. For more information on the UPC, click here.

Key takeaways: UPC Webinar Part III

General 

• According to the UPC report of end of February, the UPC is handling so far 96 infringement actions, 23 applications for provisional measures, preservation of evidence and orders for inspection and 24 revocation actions. 
• Language of proceedings: German leads English by 48% to 43%, but this may be influenced by early cases in German local divisions. An order changed the language from Dutch to English, but a German-to-English change was refused due to insufficiently substantiated arguments.

Preliminary objections (PO) 

• According to R. 19.1 RoP, PO must be filed within one of month of service of Statement of claim and is limited to objections against (i) the competence of the UPC (territorial and temporal), (ii) the jurisdiction of the Division and (iii) the language of the Statement of claim. Other objections (outside the scope of R. 19 RoP) can be dealt with in main proceedings. 
• Territorial scope of UPC might change between the lodging of the complaint and the oral proceeding so that the requests should be formulated to determine UPCA territory at the time of oral proceedings; temporal scope also covers infringement committed before entry into force of the UPCA on June 1, 2023 (cf. ORD_576853/2023 of Munich Local Division, J.…