Today marked the first day of Kisaco Research’s fourth annual Patent Litigation Summit Europe, this year taking place at the impressive Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam from January 18 to January 21. The conference is expected to host roughly 800 attendees, and this year ip fray is the official media partner. We will be reporting on the panels and interviewing speakers on the sidelines all week.
Below is a short breakdown of the highlights from day one, which was fully dedicated to litigation at the Unified Patent Court (UPC), including a panel that featured ip fray’s founder Florian Mueller.
UPC: better than expected?
Sean Alexander of Umicore, who co-chaired day one with Alex Morgan of Paul Hastings, opened the conference by asking the audience whether they thought the UPC has been more, less, or the same amount of successful as they’d expected. The majority of the room, including Mr. Alexander himself, said that the UPC is proceeding better than expected.
This can also be reflected in some of the data that was shared today. On a panel of UPC judges, one shared data (updated December 31, 2025) on the UPC’s Court of Appeal (CoA) decisions. So far, over 316 appeals have been filed there, and 200 are now closed. There have been 22 discretionary reviews and only six applications for a rehearing.
Because of the overwhelming number of applications, the CoA’s third panel – announced in October – is already up and running (October 10, 2025 ip fray article). And, according to one panellist, the decision to launch a third panel did not come too early.
On a separate panel, the following question was asked:
Does a counterclaim for revocation impact claim construction in the UPC? According to several of the panellists, if a defendant does not even attempt to file a counterclaim for revocation, it is a very easy win for the patentee – and so the simple answer is yes. This is shown in the data, they noted:
| Court | Counterclaim for revocation filed and decided | Counterclaim for revocation not filed/decided |
| Munich Local Division (LD) | 44% valid and infringed, 50% invalid, 6% valid but not infringed | 100% infringed |
| Dusseldorf LD | 50% valid and infringed, 25% invalid, 25% valid but not infringed | 100% infringed |
| Mannheim LD | 36% valid and infringed, 45% invalid, 18% valid but not infringed | 67% infringed, 33% not infringed |
The EPO has grown into an “algorithmic machine”
During a debate about using parallel UPC and European Patent Office (EPO) proceedings as a strategic tool, Filip De Corte, Head of IP at Syngenta, agreed with the statement that the UPC should never stay for the EPO, swift pan-EU relief beats the risk of inconsistent validity outcomes. That should be the default, he noted.
While Mr. De Corte generally agreed that the European framework for protecting innovation would benefit from a convergence of legal test outcomes at the UPC and the EPO, he emphasized that convergence “should not be the main goal”. And, he added, if one body were to converge toward the other, it should be the EPO towards the UPC – not the other way around. “As a system, the EPO does not really work in certain situations,” he said. “The EPO has grown into an ‘algorithmic machine’ that does not have any means of dealing with ‘fake data’ in patent applications – so they have to take patent applications at face value,” Mr. De Corte noted. “In my field, declarations are not worth the paper they are written on in an EPO proceeding – the EPO just drops them in the bin,” he added.
“The EPO lives under this bizarre dogma of the benefit of doubt – one that the UPC does not work under. One of our biggest frustrations has been that when both parties seem more or less right, the EPO will usually side with the patentee,” he said. Syngenta is an active patent enforcer, and Mr. De Corte emphasized that his company just wants to be part of a system that “gives out enforceable patents”.
In response to an audience question asking “Do we still need an opposition procedure at the EPO?”, Mr. De Corte re-emphasized that this system “is simply not working – at least in my field of technology” and that the benefit of doubt is the “big disease” that is impeding it from doing so.
Attempting to change the status quo
ip fray’s Florian Mueller also spoke on a panel today, alongside Raquel Frisardi, senior corporate counsel at Novo Nordisk, and chaired by Tjibbe Douma of Bird & Bird.
The panel discussion touched upon many things, including how far long-arm jurisdiction should go, to which Ms. Frisardi said this would be difficult to predict, while Mr. Mueller said he believed that in more than 50% of cases it would work for parties to go to any division of the UPC and use this provision.
However, beyond that, things are trickier, they agreed. At some point, judges will draw boundaries, Ms. Frisardi said. And my position on whether the UPC should rule on U.S. patents, for example, is “skeptical”, Mr. Mueller commented. The BMW v. Onesta case (latest coverage here January 17, 2026 ip fray article) was inevitably used as an example to demonstrate how this may not work. In that case, Judge Alan D. Albright of the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas attempted to order Onesta to withdraw its cases before a court in Munich through an injunction issued in the U.S.
“It’s going to be a tall order for Onesta to get the Federal Circuit to say ‘you can do that, we don’t have any problem with asserting U.S. patents in non-U.S. courts’ – I see a less than 50% chance of it happening,” Mr. Mueller said.
While in most cases judges are trying to adapt to the status quo, in this case Judge Albright is attempting to change the status quo, he added.
Mr. Douma then asked the audience whether the UPC has shown itself to be more patentee-friendly – with 50% saying yes and 50% saying no.
While Novo Nordisk has yet to enforce its patents at the UPC, Ms. Frisardi noted that there has been an increase in the number of life sciences companies that have used the UPC in recent months. While this is not for predictability – although no court is “really predictable” – or for the simple fact that it’s easier to get a preliminary injunction (PI), a major part of the forum’s increasing popularity in the pharmaceutical industry is the cost savings, she said.
Mr. Mueller, meanwhile, noted that in 2025, the Landgericht München I (Munich I Regional Court) got more cases than the entire UPC (January 2, 2026 ip fray article). “If you have a portfolio strategy, hedge your bets and go to different fora. And from a litigation tactics point of view, Munich has to be part of it,” he emphasized.
Commenting on the popularity of the UPC, he noted that when being “realistic”, it is important to note that it is still pretty hard to get leverage over large tech companies. One thing he added that particularly limits the UPC’s growth potential is access to litigation funders. This community struggles to bet on injunctions – and is traditionally more interested in damages awards, he concluded.