Another layer of complexity in a high-stakes cross-jurisdictional competition, patent, and trade secrets dispute with cases pending in different U.S. and European courts (plus, regulatory investigations). This is like a “reverse Onesta” play, and what happens here could also have implications for patent cases.
Context:
- SAP’s first-ever offensive European patent infringement suit was filed with the Unified Patent Court’s (UPC) Dusseldorf Local Division (LD) last year against another German company, Celonis (July 21, 2025 ip fray article). The hearing has meanwhile been scheduled for November 2026.
- That filing happened around the time the United States District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed Celonis’s U.S. antitrust and unfair competition law (UCL) complaint. But the latter was surprisingly revived, in an amended form, for the largest part (October 28, 2025 ip fray article).
- The parties have brought various patent infringement lawsuits against each other in the U.S. and Europe.
- In the Northern District of California, SAP tried to add patent infringement counterclaims to Celonis’s antitrust action, but the court was unreceptive to the idea and SAP decided to refile elsewhere. A little later, however, Celonis raised IP claims of its own: over the alleged misappropriation of trade secrets (May 4, 2026 ip fray article).
- That proposed (and opposed) U.S. amendment comes long after SAP sought declaratory judgment (DJ) of non-misappropriation of trade secrets under both U.S. and German law, with a tactical filing in a German court that lacked in personam jurisdiction only to be referred to a court that lacked in rem jurisdiction before it finally reached the Mannheim Regional Court’s Second Civil Chamber. That chamber made many high-profile patent rulings in the past and has already scheduled the trial. Celonis would rather litigate those claims in the U.S. and, within Germany, would have preferred the Munich I Regional Court.
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As this dispute unfolds, we will try to find out about the judges as well as counsel for the parties in the Mannheim case. A January 2025 filing on Celonis’s behalf in the German DJ action was made by Hogan Lovells’s (ip fray firm profile) Dr. Morten Petersenn. Hogan Lovells also represents Celonis in patent litigation on both sides of the Atlantic.
- Those who attended a UPC hearing in Mannheim may have noticed that the Verwaltungsgerichtshof (VGH) Baden-Württemberg (Supreme Administrative Court of Baden-Wurttemberg) is in the same building as the UPC’s Mannheim Local Division (or, actually, the other way round: the UPC occupies a smaller part of the building). But that is the appeals court above (among others) the Karlsruhe Administrative Court. There is no such thing as a Mannheim Administrative Court (first-instance court): Mannheim is part of the Karlsruhe Administrative Court’s district. ↩︎
- Another exception where a strong connection with patents warranted reporting by ip fray on a trade secrets matter was famous patent monetizer Erich Spangenberg’s trade secret litigation finance initiative (January 15, 2026 ip fray article). ↩︎