Unified Patent Court – the first month’s activity

The Unified Patent Court (UPC) opened for business on 1 June 2023 and, as expected, a number of actions (14 in fact) were filed that day, with two the following day and four more since then.

In terms of declared value in dispute, the highest profile actions are back-to-back infringement and revocation actions filed by Amgen (Patentee) and Sanofi/Regeneron (Defendants), both valued at €100m. These are in the patent family that was successfully challenged before the US Supreme Court in Amgen v. Sanofi No. 20-1074, Fed. Cir. 2021. The fact that the patent was not opted out and that the revocation action, filed 6 hours after the infringement action, names the same value in dispute, hints at a pre-agreement between the parties to use the Court as a quick, low-cost forum for dispute resolution. (There is no reason for the revocation action to name such a high value. Recoverable costs cap out at €55m.) 

Other related actions are:

• Edwards Lifesciences v Meril in the Nordic-Baltic division and Munich local division
• Avago v Tesla in Munich and Hamburg (two different patents)
• Ocado v Autostore in Nordic-Baltic, Dusseldorf and Milan Divisions (three different patents)
• Philips v S.G. Edrich & Belkin GmbH in Düsseldorf and Munich local divisions (three different patents).

One can conclude that, although there are 20 different actions, they relate to 14 different patent battles.

Here follows our charts of the actions by value and by court division. In the first chart, the actions are in the order listed in the Court’s Case Management System, but this is not the chronological order of filing. It seems that the number assigned to a case by the system is not predicated on time or sequence of filing. 

It emerges that a case may take some days to appear on the CMS, and the system is subject to random notifications that details are not available. (These frequently re-appear if searched at a later time.)

No pleadings are yet available.

In a report of 26 June, the Presidium of the Court reported that it had received 6 protective measures (more specifically, 4 applications for provisional measures; 2 applications to preserve evidence), 3 revocation actions, and 14 Infringement actions. The Court also received 236 protective letters, which are not searchable in the system.

Click here for a download of the data in spreadsheet form.