This litigation appears closely pool-related, so the article is avaliable free of charge.
Context: Just before last Christmas, Huawei won a WiFi 6 standard-essential patent (SEP) injunction against Netgear in the Unified Patent Court’s (UPC) Munich Local Division (LD) (December 18, 2024 ip fray article). An antisuit injunction (ASI) attack by Netgear on the UPC failed (December 24, 2024 ip fray article). Shortly thereafter, Netgear took a license to Sisvel’s WiFi 6 pool and settled the dispute with Huawei, the largest contributor to the pool (January 4, 2025 ip fray article).
What’s new: An August 19, 2025 Huawei v. HP infringement lawsuit over the winning patent from the Netgear UPC case, EP3611989 (“Method and apparatus for transmitting wireless local area network information”), has now become discoverable in the court’s case registry.
Direct impact:
- As the Munich LD routinely applies an intra-district assignment rule that it adopted from the Landgericht MĂĽnchen I (Munich I Regional Court), the HP case is before the same panel that decided the Netgear one. Even the third (foreign) legally qualified judge will be the same. Therefore, unless HP thinks that Netgear, which was represented by the same law firm and (by virtue of being the leading router maker) knows WiFi inside out, failed to raise a strong non-essentiality or invalidity contention, and/or hopes that a new technically qualified judge (if the panel needs one at all this time around) will change the legally qualified judges’ perspective, the technical merits are a foregone conclusion.
- On the FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing) side, HP could (if it hasn’t already) easily distinguish itself from Netgear by seriously engaging with Sisvel not only after an injunction. What disposed of Netgear’s FRAND defense was that it did not persuade the court of why the pool option, besides which a bilateral one was also on the table, was unpalatable. Therefore, the court did not even reach other unwilling-licensee criteria. But market acceptance ups the ante for HP. Various other license deals have been struck on those terms since the Netgear settlement, most notably with Cisco, a company known to advocate low FRAND rates (July 22, 2025 LinkedIn post by ip fray). Amazon signed up even a while before Netgear (March 5, 2024 ip fray article), and a redacted judgment released subsequently deemed Huawei to have overcomplied with its FRAND licensing obligation (March 19, 2024 ip fray article).
Wider ramifications:
- TP-Link surprisingly brought a UK FRAND action, which is undoubtedly about WiFi SEPs and can be safely assumed to aim for an interim-license declaration, against Huawei this month (September 8, 2025 ip fray article). HP may consider it a waste of resources as pushback from Munich would be a given (July 18, 2025 ip fray article).
- Against Netgear, Huawei was also rather likely to win an injunction in the Munich I Regional Court over a different WiFi 6 SEP. At the time of the settlement, the trial had already been held. It is possible that Huawei will file against HP in the same court over the same patent, also with a view to anti-antisuit relief.
It is a structucal problem for the UPC that a disproportionate number of cases gets filed in the Germany-based LDs, and above all, in the Munich LD. That can slow down dispute resolution (August 29, 2025 ip fray article; mentions a pool-related SEP case before the other Munich LD panel). But the hammer will come down sooner or later.
Panel composition
Judicial economy favors cases over the same patents being put before the same judges. In the Munich I Regional Court, such cases are typically adjudicated faster.
ip fray recognizes the objective reasons for which the UPC’s Munich LD deservedly enjoys the status of a patent litigation hotspot. At the same time, the vision behind the UPC requires greater venue diversity, which we promote. For example, over the past five days we’ve attended UPC hearings in the Paris and Milan LDs. We can send native speakers of any of the UPC’s top four languages to attend hearings.
Florian Mueller
The UPC should develop a strategy for further increasing the attractiveness of its ex-Germany venues. Some of the concepts developed in Munich, such as its intra-division assignment rules, could be adopted UPC-wide.
Here, the three legally qualified judges (LQJs) will be the same as in the Netgear case: Presiding Judge Dr. Matthias Zigann, Judge Tobias Pichlmaier and Judge Edger Brinkman (the Hague LD’s Presiding Judge):
- The involvement of the two former ones, who are based in Munich, follows from the longstanding Munich tradition according to which the case should be assigned to the same judges again if they previously performed substantial analysis of the patent-in-suit. It is not perfectly clear what amounts to “substantial” in this context, particularly in the UPC with its frontloaded proceedings, but the criterion is undoubtedly satisfied here, given that they had rendered a detailed final judgment.
- Judge Brinkman is obviously not bound by the Munich assignment rule, but it is hardly a coincidence that he is on the panel. It makes sense.
However, then-Technically Qualified Judge (TQJ) Patrice Vidon resigned from the UPC in late 2024 (December 2024 LinkedIn post by ip fray). The LQJs may either determine that they learned enough from then-TQJ Vidon last time and don’t need a TQJ this time around. Otherwise, a new TQJ will have to be assigned from the UPC’s pool. The involvement of a different TQJ will, however, benefit HP only if he or she can convince the LQJs that they made a mistake last time or that a new argument by HP is a game changer. That is not impossible, but rather unlikely.
Such a relatively high degree of predictability adds to a court’s popularity.
Counsel
Huawei’s complaint was brought by Clifford Chance’s Dr. Tobias Hessel. He will obviously not be handling this alone. Against Netgear, he was joined by Clifford Chance’s Thomas Misgaiski, Lea Prehn and Dr. Marie Gessat. For the FRAND part against Netgear, Huawei additionally retained Bird & Bird’s Christian Harmsen, Dr. Matthias Meyer and Dr. Joerg Witting (“Jörg” in German), which was presumably a response to the enormous resources Netgear threw at its defenses. For the technical part, Braun-Dullaeus Pannen Emmerling patent attorneys Dr. Friedrich Emmerling and Dr. Karl-Ulrich Braun-Dullaeus teamed up with Dr. Hessel. Huawei’s in-house counsel (as we reported last time and is likely accurate again): Emil Zhang, Dylan Li, Dr. Thomas Dreiser, Liang Gao and Wanting Shao.
Dr. Hessel’s clients include TP-Link, so if Huawei responded to that company’s UK FRAND action with enforcement in the UPC or Germany, he would not be allowed to act. He and his team have, for the time being, frustrated Atlas Global’s WiFi patent enforcement campaign against TP-Link (July 10, 2025 LinkedIn post by ip fray). But even if he cannot play a role in that event, we may see EP’989 in action again.
HP is being represented by Freshfields (counsel of record: Carlotta Mannes). Freshfields also defended Netgear, but then-lead counsel Dr. Stephan Dorn has since joined CMS, another major firm with a presence in various European countries.