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Summary of the panel on the UPC23.10.2025

We provide a summary of the LIDC Congress 2025 in Vienna regarding the panel on: “2 years of unitary patent and many more to come".

The Closing Panel of the LIDC Congress 2025 in Vienna on the UPC, entitled ‘2 years of unitary patent and many more to come: the impact of the UPC on “smaller” jurisdictions – risks and opportunities’, focused on ‘competition’ in the broader sense between local and regional chambers of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) and between the UPC and national courts. Under the chairmanship of Michael Woller, partner at Schoenherr Attorneys at Law, the discussion was led by Klaus Grabinski, President of the Court of Appeal / Unified Patent Court (UPC), Mary-Rose McGuire, Professor of Intellectual, Property and Civil Procedure Law at the University of Osnabruck, Mojca Mlakar, judge at Court of First Instance / Unified Patent Court (UPC) at the Ljubljana Local Chamber, and Rainer Beetz, partner at SONN Patentanwälte IP Attorneys.
President Klaus Grabinski began with an overview of the structure and functioning of the UPC, followed by statistics with a particular focus on the involvement of parties from smaller Member States and the distribution of case numbers among the local chambers. In a keynote speech, Professor Mary-Rose McGuire compared the distribution of cases between the local chambers with the distribution of cases between national courts prior to the introduction of the UPC – and pointed out that important first-instance landmark decisions had been made by ‘smaller’ local chambers of the UPC.
Patent Attorney Rainer Beetz questioned the system set out in Article 8 of the agreement on a Unified Patent Court (UPC Agreement), which provides that certain local chambers are to be composed of two national judges (and one international judge), while the other local chambers are to be composed of only one national judge. This increases the predictability of the composition of the court for plaintiffs in certain chambers and leads to a concentration of proceedings in such chambers. Judge Mojca Mlakar provided valuable practical insights into her work as an international judge (springer) in various chambers.
In summary, the concentration of proceedings in certain (especially German) local chambers, coupled with the underutilisation of other chambers, appears to be something of an ‘anomaly’. However, this is hardly surprising given the history of case numbers prior to the introduction of the UPC and the structure of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court.
This ‘anomaly’ could be mitigated by (i) greater involvement of international judges, including in chambers with two national judges (especially as rapporteurs), (ii) the increasingly apparent shift away from German as the language of proceedings towards English (and the associated easier ‘mixing’ of the composition of the chambers) and (iii) possibly also the creation of additional senates in regional chambers with high demand (which reduces the predictability of the composition of these chambers). However, an amendment to Article 8 of the UPC Agreement does not appear realistic.

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Summary of the panel on the UPC23.10.2025

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