Context: In a little over a week, the judges whose appointments the Unified Patent Court (UPC) announced in the fall (October 10, 2025 ip fray article) will be sworn in. A third panel of the Court of Appeal (CoA) will be created. Presiding Judge Ulrike Voss (“Voß” in German), who started her UPC career on the Munich seat of the Central Division (CD) and is now presiding over the Munich Local Division’s (LD) second panel, will be promoted to that new CoA panel. Judge András Kupecz (a Dutch national already assigned to CD Munich; August 30, 2024 ip fray interview) will then preside over CD Munich, and Judge Dr. Daniel Voss (also “Voß” in German) over the second panel of the Munich LD, which will be joined by Judge Dr. Georg Werner, who is presently presiding over the 21st Civil Chamber of the Munich I Regional Court.
What’s new: Yesterday evening, the UPC announced the appointment of five new legally qualified judges (December 22, 2025 announcement by the UPC):
- CD Munich: Austrian Taylor Wessing partner Thomas Adocker
- Munich LD: German Federal Patent Court judge Ina Schnurr (Wikipedia page (in German))
- The Hague LD: Dutch Supreme Court Advocate-General Robert van Peursem
- Dusseldorf LD: Dusseldorf Higher Regional Court judge Dr. Ingo Rinken
- Nordic-Baltic Regional Division (NBRD): Lithuanian Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) member Goda Ambrasaité-Balyniené
Direct impact:
- It looks like the Dusseldorf LD will now have two panels, presumably with Judge Dr. Bérénice Thom presiding over the second panel.
- Apparently there wasn’t the prerequisite political will to create a third Munich LD panel right away. That may take just one more appointment to the Munich LD. The primary bottleneck for any UPC panel is the presiding judge: he can’t just come from elsewhere and sit by designation. It would be the most logical next step for Judge Tobias Pichlmaier to preside over an additional Munich LD panel. He has a lot of UPC experience by now; he has the “least German” writing style of any German patent judge (clear and concise), as evidenced on many occasions, including when he made a historic preliminary reference to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on the question of access to preliminary injunctions (PI); he presided over Munich I Regional Court and Munich Higher Regional Court panels; and he demonstrated his versatile mind when he temporarily focused on competition law.
- It is understandable, however, that the UPC is reluctant to grow the Munich LD too fast. The high concentration of UPC cases in Germany, and particularly in Munich, is irreconcilable with the notion of a pan-European judiciary. Therefore, litigants must be prepared to wait longer for their decisions if they file in Munich, and if time is of the essence, they may consider other divisions, of which ip fray particularly recommends Vienna as the geographically and culturally closest alternative to Munich. Practically, litigants will get at least one German judge to join the panel, and Presiding Judge Dr. Walter Schober’s (July 20, 2024 ip fray interview) has already joined panels of the four German LDs on numerous occasions, so he is intimately familiar with the German approach to patent law.
- The Dutch influence over the UPC is disproportionate to the size of the country and the number of patent cases filed there (though the Hague LD is clearly the most popular one outside of Germany): Presiding Judge Rian Kalden and new appointee Bart van den Broek on the CoA; soon-to-be-Presiding Judge András Kupecz on CD Munich; and Judges Edger Brinkman and Margot Kokke as well as new appointee Robert van Peursem on the Hague LD. This may also have implications for the development of the UPC’s FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing) case law.
Wider ramifications: Given that the UPC is not yet taking the necessary measures to accelerate the adjudication of cases filed with the Munich LD, litigants will continue to look not only to other UPC divisions but also to national courts, above all, the Landgericht München I (MunichI Regional Court). The question of who will succeed soon-UPC judge Dr. Georg Werner as the 21st Civil Chamber’s presiding judge is the one the patent litigation community is now most interested in. As we mentioned last week (December 17, 2025 ip fray article), the candidate virtually everyone in the patent litigation community would prefer to see appointed is Judge Dr. Hubertus Schacht.
Some further information on the background of the five appointees (and further thoughts on what this means for the related divisions):
1. Thomas Adocker to CD Munich
1.1 Taylor Wessing’s expansion to Austria didn’t work out
Mr. Adocker will join soon-to-be-Presiding Judge Kupecz’s panel. Both have in common that they left private practice in favor of a judicial career. Not a single German patent litigator has done so. Economically, successful German patent litigators stand too much to lose. They have (on average) far greater opportunities than their colleagues in smaller European countries.
It was actually because of the UPC that Taylor Wessing’s patent litigation practice expanded to Austria. But Mr. Adocker has had only one case in Vienna (a coffee machine PI that his client was seeking did not materialize). The surprising shooting stars among Austrian patent law practitioners are, unlike Mr. Adocker, patent attorneys: Torggler Hofmann’s Dr. Markus Gangl and Florian Robl, Ph.D. They defended against that PI motion, but they have also brought cases outside of Austria.
With Mr. Adocker joining the UPC, it remains to be seen whether Taylor Wessing will maintain an Austrian presence.
1.2 Taylor Wessing’s times they are a-changin’
This is yet another departure from Taylor Wessing. The firm is undergoing a transformation that is an unprecedented in the European patent litigation landscape:
- Taylor Wessing is merging with U.S. powerhouse Winston & Strawn to create a new transatlantic player named Winston Taylor (December 15, 2025 merger press release).
- A strong Munich team left this year to form PENTARC (ip fray firm profile). To be fair, there still is top-notch patent litigation expertise at Taylor Wessing in Munich under Dr. Gisbert Hohagen, albeit with less personpower (at least in the short term) than before.
- But Taylor Wessing (and soon Winston Taylor) is in a strong position to find reinforcements. For example, some lawyers joined from Simmons & Simmons.
- Taylor Wessing’s Dutch team around Dr. Wim Maas enjoys an excellent reputation and is playing an important role in Ericsson’s new enforcement campaign against Transsion (December 19, 2025 ip fray article).
1.3 Mr. Adocker’s longer-term future may be in Vienna
At the moment, the Vienna LD is underutilized. But once the UPC litigation community realizes that Vienna has the potential to be a faster alternative to Munich, it will get a second permanent judge. It would be unsurprising to see Mr. Adocker return to his home country then.
1.4 Expect to see Mr. Adocker on many German LD panels
Many UPC cases are litigated in German, and each UPC panel needs at least one legally qualified judge who is not from the same country. There is a pool of German-speaking judges, but so far only one native speaker of German who doesn’t have German citizenship: Judge Dr. Schober from Vienna.
Now there will be a second in Mr. Adocker. It is a safe assumption that he will sit on many German LD panels going forward. CD Munich is nowhere near as busy as the German LDs.
That means relief in the short term for Judge Kupecz, whose German is excellent but who will have less time for travel when he becomes a presiding judge. It also means that Judge Dr. Schober may travel less, particularly if the Vienna LD gets more cases. As mentioned above, the presiding judge is the primary bottleneck.
2. Ina Schnurr to Munich LD
A few years ago, Ms. Schnurr became the Presiding Judge of one of the nullity senates of the Bundespatentgericht (BPatG; Federal Patent Court of Germany). As far as we’ve been able to research, she has never adjudicated a patent infringement case. Prior to joining the BPatG in 2011, she served on the Ulm Regional Court for six years. Ulm is in the middle between Munich and Stuttgart, and no patent infringement cases can be filed there. Her initial focus at the BPatG was trademark law, but she now has a decade of patent law experience.
None of that means to doubt her qualifications. Patent infringement cases, like revocation cases, start with claim construction (though in Europe claim construction is not as formal as the U.S. Markman process; it is actually a conflation of claim construction and infringement mapping). Nullity cases also involve mapping, just that the prior art against which the contested claims are mapped is not a real-world product most of the time.
Also, BPatG nullity judges see pleadings and decisions from parallel infringement actions on a daily basis.
3. Robert van Peursem to The Hague LD
This judge doesn’t need much of an introduction after a career at the highest levels of the Dutch judiciary and as an external member of the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBoA) of the European Patent Office (EPO). He has always had a high profile among Europe’s patent judges, speaking out on key policy questions and advocating the unitary patent and the creation of the UPC.
The Hague LD now has three permanent judges. With such a judicial heavyweight as Mr. van Peursem on board, a second panel can be created any day of the week. Maybe he will be a presiding judge from Day One.
It is even more surprising in retrospect that he was not appointed to the CoA earlier this year.
4. Dr. Ingo Rinken to Dusseldorf LD
Judge Dr. Rinken’s career path partly resembles that of Presiding Judge Ronny Thomas as both joined the UPC’s Dusseldorf LD from the Second Civil Senate of the Oberlandesgericht Düsseldorf (Dusseldorf Higher Regional Court), a patent-specialized division over which one of Germany’s most famous patent judges, Presiding Judge Professor Thomas Kuehnen (“Kühnen” in German), presided until his retirement.
With Judges Thomas, Dr. Thom, Dr. Schumacher and soon also Dr. Rinken, the Dusseldorf LD will have four permanent judges. That means two panels. Otherwise the ration between non-presiding and presiding judges would not make sense when considering the bottleneck that a presiding judge represents.
5. Goda Ambrasaité-Balyniené to NBRD
Ms. Ambrasaité-Balyniené will be the UPC’s first Lithuanian, but not its first Baltic judge: Judge Kai Härmand from Estonia has been sitting on the NBRD since Day One (and has been dividing her time between the UPC and the Harju County Court).
The NBRD appears to do very good work. Its extensive cross-examinations of experts are a feature that some litigators find intriguing. Its decisions are clear and well-structured. But its case load is far from what would warrant the creation of a second panel. Its judges already get to spend time on other UPC panels.
Presumably, a key part of the reason for this appointment was that at some point each contracting member state should have at least one legally qualified judge. Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta and Romania (where Judge Liviu Zidaru appears the obvious candidate) are still waiting. Given the size of those countries and the fact that hardly any patent cases are filed in their national courts, Luxembourg and Malta may have to wait much longer. Luxembourg can’t complain as it is the seat of the CoA and of the President of the Court of First Instance.