Announcement of the UPC Judges

The Court of Appeal in Luxembourg will be taken, among others, by Dr. Klaus Grabinski and Dr. Patricia Rombach from the X. Civil Senate of the German Federal Supreme Court.

Prof. Dr. Maximilian Haedicke from the University of Freiburg will be a member of the central chamber in Paris and Dr. Ulrike Voß from the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf will be a member of the central chamber in Munich.

The German local chambers will be taken in Munich by Dr. Tobias Pichlmaier (Regional Court Munich I) and Dr. Mathias Zigann (currently Regional Court Munich I; from November 1, 2022 Higher Regional Court Munich), in Düsseldorf by Dr. Bérénice Thom (Regional Court Duesseldorf) and Ronny Thomas (Higher Regional Court Duesseldorf), in Mannheim by Holger Kircher (Regional Court Mannheim) and Dr. Peter Michael Tochtermann (Regional Court Mannheim), and the local chamber in Hamburg will be staffed by Sabine Klepsch (Regional Court Düsseldorf) and Dr. Stefan Schilling (Higher Regional Court Hamburg).

As is customary at the UPC, the local chambers, which are generally constituted by three judges, will be composed of two national judges and one international judge. In addition to the above-mentioned composition of the local chambers, there will thus be one more judge from the pool of judges. Although it was initially discussed whether all judges of the local chambers would be newly appointed from the pool of judges on a case-by-case basis, the UPC now seems to have decided on a fixed composition of the national judges for each local chamber. Only the international judges will probably be appointed on a rotating basis.   

Regarding the appointment of the technical judges for the pool of judges, who are brought into the chambers of the UPC on a case-by-case basis, it should be emphasized that one third of the positions filled with German judges are occupied by experienced technical judges of the German Federal Patent Court (“BPatG”). The remaining positions were filled by patent attorneys from law firms and industry. It will be interesting to see how they will deal with potential conflicts of interest between their judicial activities and existing mandates and future mandates of their respective law firms or their companies, especially since some of the law firms were regularly involved in industry-wide litigation. According to Art. 7 of the regulations of the UPC (ac_07_22022022_e.pdf (unified-patent-court.org)), there will be a code of conduct for judges in this regard. However, the technical judges of the German Federal Patent Court are certainly at an advantage in this regard.