Are you Prepared for the Unified Patent Court?

With the expected arrival of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) and associated Unitary Patent (UP) in late 2022 or early 2023, European patent litigation will soon be entering an exciting new chapter. The UPC itself will be a brand new system aiming to providing a degree of unification in cross-border patent litigation that has never been achieved before. As a consequence the court is highly innovative in many ways, but it was designed based on experience from a range of existing national and European patent systems and the resulting blend has a number of familiar traits, including interesting similarities in core areas with opposition proceedings at the European Patent Office (EPO). In the webinar, we provide an overview of the expected procedure before the UPC in typical scenarios, explore similarities and differences relative to EPO opposition proceedings, and present some thoughts about planning to work efficiently with the UPC from the start.

Topics covered include:

• Introduction to the UPC and UP
• UP and EPO oppositions: similarities and differences
• How to leverage EPO opposition experience at the UPC
• Assembling an optimal team for UPC litigation in different scenarios