Today we would like to present to you a new way of recognizing excellence in the legal profession with a focus on the results that clients are looking for: ip fray‘s achievement lists for Unified Patent Court (UPC) and standard-essential patent (SEP) cases.
If you click on the menu at the top, you find an item named Firm Profiles. From there you can get to firm directories and achievement lists for UPC and SEP cases. You can also click on one of the links below:
Note that this just version 1.0. We are pleased to have more than 20 participating firms on board across the two categories. Most of them haven’t filled out the achievement forms yet, which is why we’re launching v1.0 only now, with a bit of delay.
We’ve added a few achievements by our own initiative, and we will do more of that work ourselves going forward. But if you’ve achieved something that fits in any of the categories and that you’d like to see listed, please reach out.
We will not publicly criticize any particular decisions made by other publications. How many stars a given firm deserves or in what tier it belongs is inherently subjective, and the decision-making processes are inevitably opaque. We know that those other rankings are here to stay, not least because in-house counsel will sometimes use them to defend a choice. But our alternative and complementary approach is here to stay as well. It will grow substantially in 2026.
The basic idea behind our lists is this: If you plan to sue someone or find yourself on the receiving end of a patent assertion, one of the factors you might consider is whether a law firm has previously solved a similar problem. Who has obtained a PI in the UPC? Who has managed to get a judgment overturned on appeal? Who has antisuit injunction experience? Who has litigated a FRAND rate-setting case? And so forth.
The sort order is “most recent first” in each category. While large firms will obviously have many entries in those lists, there still is a chance even for the smallest firm to get attention for its wins. All achievements are also listed on the profile page of a participating firm.
ip fray believes to be in a particularly good position to maintain those lists because we strive to cover every significant UPC and SEP decision (and increasingly also every important patent ruling related to pharma, life sciences and med tech; we may create achievement lists for those categories sometime in 2026). Most of the time, the entires in our achievement lists can simply point to an ip fray article that covered the decision. We only list outcomes that have been reported on or are otherwise verifiable.
Please take a look and let us know what you think! Again, you can always find the lists via ip fray‘s menu at the top.