What a typical UPC action looks like so far

The Unified Patent Court (UPC) has been up and running for more than three months it is possible now to look at some case statistics.

Searching the Court Case Management System (CMS) is not easy. There is no facility to search cases by their case numbers. No doubt this simple functionality will be added soon, but for the present we need to know the patent(s) involved or the name of one of the parties in order to access a case. Separately the UPC website has a list of cases (without case numbers) giving names and patent numbers. Our findings are based on cases that appear on that list.

Not surprisingly, the German local divisions lead the pack. However, up to now, Munich seems to be the most popular choice. Also, the Milan local division seems quite well received.

Secondly let us look at the distributions of languages.

In total, the languages used are as follows:

Thirdly, let us look at the values of the action. This will be important not only for the court fee to be paid to the court but also for the compensation paid to the prevailing party.

The distribution is as follows:

The table shows the number of cases between adjacent threshold values. The mean value is approx. €10M, the median value is €4M. This is comparable to values of typical actions in Germany.

To summarise, a typical infringement action is filed in German with the local division of Munich and will have a value of the action of €4M with court fees of €37,000. 

A case with a value of €4M has a ceiling of €400,000 for recoverable costs (double if there are separate infringement and validity actions), but according to the preamble to the Administrative Committee’s 24 April 2023 decision on scale of ceilings, the ceiling is merely a safeguard against undue recovery of representation cost, and is the last to apply when the Court makes its decision on costs. We will have to wait for decisions from the Court about what portion of that ceiling is to be reimbursed by the losing party.