Summary of the UPC month
Half-time!
The Court of First Instance received 311 cases in the first 6 months of 2025 and is now close to the milestone of one thousand cases with a total number of 946.
June saw the biggest total monthly increase in 2025 so far:
- 31 infringement actions and
- 6 applications for provisional measures
If UPC users continue this trend, the number of infringement actions could be more than 30% higher than in 2024 at the end of the year.
The projected number of stand-alone revocation actions is, however, lower than in the previous year. But the actual results will, of course, only be known at the end of the year.
Meanwhile, the Court of Appeal seems to have had a comparably quiet month with only 8 new filings across categories.
Key decisions in a nutshell
The key decisions of the month are dealing with:
(1) Infringement of functional claim features (Local Division Munich, UPC_CFI_324/2024, 6 June 2025)
If a device has the "suitability" required according to the patent claim, it is irrelevant whether the patent-compliant properties and effects are achieved regularly, only in exceptional cases or only by chance and whether the user intends to achieve these effects.
(2) Amending a counterclaim for revocation (Mannheim Local Division, UPC_CFI_745/2024, 6 June 2025)
A claimant in a counterclaim for revocation is not free, or at least privileged, to amend its case compared to a claimant in an infringement action. Rather, R. 263 RoP applies in full to a counterclaim for revocation. It follows from R. 25 (1) (b), (c) and (d) RoP that the grounds for revocation must already be asserted in the counterclaim for revocation and that the documents on which the claimant in the counterclaim for revocation bases its arguments must also be submitted there.
(3) Security for costs (UPC Court of Appeal, UPC_CoA_393/2025, 20 June 2025)
Art. 69(4) UPCA does not provide a legal basis for granting a security for costs at the request of the claimant in an infringement action. The same applies to a claimant in a revocation action pursuant to Art. 32(1)(d) UPCA). The ratio behind Art. 69(4) UPCA is the protection of a defendant against an insolvent claimant, who initiates an action, without having sufficient means to compensate the defendant for the legal costs incurred by the proceedings he was involved in at the initiative of the claimant.
Remarks
The share of the German Local Divisions of the overall UPC traffic continues to be huge. This trend will likely further be fostered by the upcoming appointments in July of further German UPC judges.
One way to make the other Local Divisions more attractive could be the assignment of well-known patent trial court judges as "international judges" pursuant to Art. 8 (2) UPCA to the respective panels. This would increase the predictability of the case management and the decision-making process which could incentivize patent owners to bring their cases to such Local Divisions. In addition, speedy proceedings appear to be guaranteed given the current caseload of these less frequented Local Divisions.
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