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As the UPC judge arrived in court the problem of bifurcation suddenly didn’t seem worth worrying about (Image from Flickr under cc licence/Mooshuu)
The Preparatory Committee for the Unified Patent Court has recently launched expression of interests of candidate judges at the UPC. As noted in the cover text the Committee adopted its detailed roadmap back in June this year and one priority of the roadmap was to help the nomination process of the first group of judges and to ensure the organisation of training of candidate judges. The call for expression of interest can be found here and the rules of the pre-selection procedure here. The closing date for the call of interest is 15 November 2013 so if you are interested you haven’t got that much time to send your applications to Mr Paul van Beukering (Chairman of the Preparatory Committee).
The call for expression of interests covers both technically qualified and legally qualified judge positions. In both instances the candidates must be nationals of a Contracting Member State, have a good command of at least one official langauge of the EPO and must be able to ensure the highest standards of competence and have proven experience in the field of patent ligitation (though under Art 2(3) of the Statute of the UPC such experiece may be acquired within the training framework of the UPC).
Legally qualified judge candidates must possess the qualification to be appointed to a judicial office in a Contract Member State and technically qualified judge candidates need to have a university degree and proven expertise in a field of technology.
The level of renumeration of the judges under Art. 12 of the Statute of the UPC has not been set yet. In an LES seminar in June, the Rt. Hon. Professor Sir Robin Jacob indicated that UPC judges may be paid less than EPO Boards of Appeal members. Sir Robin also suggested that the Court of Appeal (to be based in Luxembourg) is the most important part of the UPC.
Applications must be sent electronically by e-mail to secretariat@unified-patent-court.org.
Mark Richardson 23 September 2013
(Blog image by Mooshuu downloaded from Flickr under a creative commons licence)
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