The Unified Patent Court (UPC) is a major success story, and it is remarkable to what extent even very senior judges (such as presiding judges of regional appeals courts) volunteer to serve as side judges on UPC first-instance panels. But this is not for everyone, and there have been a (very) few resignations to date.
Today the UPC announced that Judge Tobias Sender will be sworn in on September 1, 2025 (next Monday) as a new judge of the Mannheim Local Division (LD), replacing Judge Dr. Holger Kircher, who resigned in accordance with Art. 9(1) of the UPC Statute.
We noted on LinkedIn last month that Presiding Judge Dr. Kircher succeeded Presiding Judge Andreas Voss (“Voß” in German) on the 6a Senate (patent and antitrust division) of the Oberlandesgericht Karlsruhe (Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court), to which all Mannheim patent and antitrust decisions are appealed. On that occasion we described Judge Dr. Kircher as follows:
There is probably no patent judge anywhere in the world who understands radio frequency technologies and some other types of technology as well as Judge Dr. Kircher. He has repeatedly impressed everyone with his grasp of technical issues, giving short shrift to lawyers trying to mislead him on technical questions. He’s rhetorically very strong, speaking freely at a level that many politicians don’t attain even with the help of a teleprompter. But he is also notorious for sometimes taking rather strong, novel and unexpected positions on the law, such as when he said in a Nokia-HTC case that one claim of a patent could be held against another claim as prior art or when he obligated Microsoft to withdraw its nullity complaint (revocation action) against a Motorola patent-in-suit as a precondition to entertaining any FRAND defense. All in all, he’s unique and always very interesting to listen to (great to follow if one doesn’t depend on his decisions).
Judge Dr. Kircher was until recently spending far more time on the Mannheim Regional Court than the UPC’s Mannheim LD, where Presiding Judge Prof. Peter Tochtermann was typically joined by Judge Dirk Boettcher (“Böttcher” in German) plus a non-German legally qualified judge (and, as needed, a technically qualified judge).
At this stage of his career, he may have considered it a better and bigger opportunity to be a full-time presiding judge at an appeals court, or the appeals court may not have been prepared to let him divide his time between two courts. Be that as it may, both the UPC and Judge Dr. Kircher will do well.
Judge Sender is from the Mannheim talent pool, and like other German patent judges such as Presiding Judge Dr. Matthias Zigann, spent some time as a legal advisor to the Bundesgerichtshof’s (Federal Court of Justice) 10th Civil Senate (the highest panel in Germany for patent cases).
The UPC’s German divisions have become so popular that they must staff up. Hopefully Judge Sender will be able to devote more of his time to the UPC than Judge Dr. Kircher before him.