Our earlier post reported on a rumour of a sunrise provision for opting out from the competence of the unified patent court at the Wragge & Co on 13 March 2013. Some further news items from this seminar are below:

• Unified patent court proceedings will be fairly quick from start to finish.  An initial 6 month period of written exchanges will be followed by an interim conference, witness hearings, oral hearing (1 day only) and written judgement in a second 6 month period for an expected end-to-end time frame of around 1 year
• An amendment to the Rules of Procedure (see rule 5 of the 14th draft) is apparently being considered to address the “exclusive competency” issue (see discussion of the issue here and here)
• Article 27 of the UPC agreement may mean that experimental exceptions for unitary patents are narrower than for nationally validated EP patents
• Rule 118 of the Rules of Procedure allow the court to suspend infringement decisions pending the outcome of a validity hearing or to render an infringement decision that is dependent on the outcome of such a validity hearing
• Ratification. Only Ireland is considered as being able to ratify this year. For everyone else the timetable appears to be 2014 onwards
• No-one really knows where the judges will come from. They will need to be multi-lingual so patent attorneys and legal professionals/judges from Eastern Europe are considered possible sources of UPC judges

Mark Richardson     26 March 2013