Context: The Unified Patent Court’s (UPC) Hague Local Division (LD) granted one preliminary injunction (PI) request by Abbott against Sibionics (SiBio) and denied another (June 25, 2024 ip fray article). The rulings revealed that the defendant had actually offered a cease-and-desist covenant with respect to the markets at issue.
What’s new: For today, the UPC’s Dusseldorf LD had scheduled a PI hearing in a third case involving the same parties. No judicial decision is needed anymore, as the parties entered into a case-specific (not global) settlement that is effectively just a cease-and-desist covenant along with an acceptance of liability for damages, which may be determined by the court if the parties cannot agree on the amount (PDF).
Direct impact: It is now questionable whether the parties are still going to appeal one or both of the recent rulings by the Hague LD, or whether they will put those cases behind them as well. Damage control: the defendant has plausibly saved costs (not only owing to the reduction of court fees) as a result of this settlement.
Wider ramifications: This has been an eventful day for the UPC’s Dusseldorf LD, which handed down the UPC’s first-ever final judgment (as opposed to a PI ruling) (July 3, 2024 ip fray article). The settlement is, arguably, another injunction, but of the contractual kind.
In order to incentivize such settlements, the Dusseldorf LD said that part of the court fees would be reimbursed. While the English version of the court’s Rules of Procedure (RoP) refers to an “action” and could be understood to relate only to main proceedings, the court turned to the French and German versions to hold that the same principle of court fees being reduced in the event of a settlement also applies to PI proceedings.
The panel: Presiding Judge (and judge-rapporteur) Ronny Thomas, Judge Dr. Bérénice Thom, Judge Mélanie Bessaud and Technically Qualified Judge Renaud Fulconis.
The settlement agreement with respect to today’s patent-in-suit was signed by either party’s lead counsel: Taylor Wessing’s Roland Kueppers (“Küppers” in German) for the plaintiff and Simmons & Simmons’s Dr. Thomas Gniadek for SiBio.