Speakers: Anna Leathley, Ben Husband, and Jake Marshall, Carpmaels & Ransford

Topic: Europe’s new Unified Patent Court (UPC), one year in: key decisions and takeaway points from the UPC’s first year

The UPC opened for business in June 2023 and has been enthusiastically embraced by parties in many technology areas. One of the objectives of the UPC was to provide simpler and quicker judicial procedures in Europe, and the court has so far met this objective, dealing with cases quickly and efficiently. In this session, we will look back on a year of swift and impactful orders regarding provisional measures, as well as decisions from the first full hearings on the merits. These orders and decisions deal with procedural issues such as the language of the proceedings, third party access to legal submissions, costs, and testing of opt outs, and we have also seen interesting decisions on substantive matters including added matter, claim interpretation and inventive step. We’ll bring you some of the highlights, and key takeaway practical points for practitioners.

Our firm has been involved in several UPC cases, and we filed the UPC’s first revocation action (Sanofi/Regeneron v Amgen UPC_CFI_1/2023). We look forward to sharing our thoughts and experiences. Anna and Ben will provide a patent attorney’s perspective, and Jake, head of the transactions team at Carpmaels, will discuss developments in the case law that are relevant to opt outs.

CLE: Approved for up to 1.5 Credits of CLE.