What US Lawyers Should Know as EU Unified Patent Court Looms

The opening of the highly anticipated Unified Patent Court, a system designed to unify intellectual property litigation across the European Union, will bring huge change for patent practitioners in the new year.

The court, scheduled to open June 1, 2023, offers European patent owners a different approach for enforcing their IP individually in each member country. The new court will enable patent holders to voluntarily assert and defend their technology across multiple countries in the EU in a single venue; however, it also exposes them to broad defeat should they lose the case.

Bloomberg Law interviewed Finnegan counsel Dr. Antje Brambrink on the possible risks for participating countries. “If you have a Unitary Patent, SPCs [supplementary protection certificates] will still need to be applied for on a county-by-country basis,” she said. “At the beginning, I think we might see a lot of appeals because there might be a lot of questions with regard to procedural issues. It is possible people will try to shape the law in the way they want to have it.”

Antje also noted that practitioners taking a wait-and-see approach “might be interested to see how the court will handle these cases, whether bifurcation will play a role.”

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