2025 Week 50
A niche skill of patent attorneys is to be able to think in blocks of 30 months. The UPC opened its doors for business on 1 June 2023 and the 30 month milestone duly rolled around at the beginning of December 2025.
The UPC Registry initially published a monthly snapshot summary of the case load of the courts. But the last of these was in respect of June 2025, with a replacement reporting format apparently still in the works.
So we thought that now would be a good time to take a look at how the case load of the different first instance divisions of the UPC has evolved since the very start. The figures reported here are those available from public sources and do not include cases that have been filed at the UPC but not yet served.
Infringement actions – German divisions dominate
The racing bar chart below shows the change in the cumulative number of first instance infringement actions since 1 June 2023, up to the end of November 2025. The message is completely clear. The divisions in Germany have established a massive number of infringement actions, with all four Local Divisions in Germany each having more infringement actions than any other division.
It's interesting to look at the tier below Munich, Düsseldorf, Mannheim and Hamburg, with the Local Divisions at The Hague, Paris and Milan establishing and growing a significant workload since around the middle of 2024.
The community will be watching to see whether the different divisions are able to keep up with the target of holding the oral hearing within 12 months of the start of the action. To date, this has been impressively adhered to.
Infringement action languages
The initial wave of actions filed in the German Local Divisions were mainly filed in the German language. This was presumably due them having been prepared in German, with the divisions only announcing relatively late that English would be a working language of those courts.
However, since the start of the UPC there has been explicit advice from the courts, wherever possible, to file in English. There have also been some high profile cases where the defendant has sought to change the language of proceedings to English.
The result, as shown in the progress of the chart below, is that infringement actions have gradually come to be dominated by English language proceedings, but with a significant proportion still being filed in German.
Revocation actions – subject matter allocation
The story is completely different for revocation actions. Here we are not talking about counterclaims for revocation. These are typically filed in the same division as the infringement action and experience has shown that bifurcation of infringement and validity is rare. Instead, we are concentrating on standalone revocation actions. These are allocated to the Central Divisions of the UPC, based on the subject matter classification of the patent.
Paris takes electronics, software, physics, construction plus any cases related to SPCs. Munich is allocated mechanical engineering and general chemistry, while Milan has pharmaceuticals, med tech and agri tech.
The bar chart below shows that the growth in revocation actions has been more lumpy than for infringement actions. But it is clear that the Paris Central Division is the busiest, with the Milan Central Division recently seeing a significant number of cases, to overtake the Munich Central Division.
Revocation actions – languages
A standalone revocation action must be filed in the language of the patent. It is therefore not surprising than English is the overwhelmingly dominant language in UPC Central Division revocation proceedings. This mirrors the EPO’s statistics that show that somewhere between 70 and 80% of European patents are granted in English. More precise figures are available for the Unitary Patent, with 76.7% being in English.
And what about provisional measures?
Finally, we took a look at where claimants are filing applications for provisional measures (preliminary injunctions and saisie applications).
The distribution of provisional measures cases echoes infringement actions, but seems to be more evenly spread. Although there are significant numbers at various German Local Divisions, it is notable that the Local Divisions of The Hague and Milan have also seen a significant proportion of these cases.
Matthew is a UPC Representative and European Patent Attorney. He is a Partner and Litigator at Mewburn Ellis. He handles patent and design work in the fields of materials and engineering. His work encompasses drafting, prosecution, opposition, dispute resolution and litigation – all stages of the patent life cycle. Matthew has a degree and PhD in materials science from the University of Oxford. His focus is on helping clients to navigate the opportunities and challenges of the Unified Patent Court.
Email: matthew.naylor@mewburn.com
