Home > Journals > MTTLR > Vol. 25 > Iss. 1 (2018)
Abstract
Despite the United Kingdom’s pending high-profile exit from the EU and rising Euroscepticism across the continent, the EU presses forward with its plans to unify patent litigation under a single court system. That new system—the Unified Patent Court—seeks to promote “uniformity of the Union legal order and the primacy of European Union law.” In pursuit of this goal, the UPC includes a number of provisions seeking to curb a rising problem facing jurisdictions across the globe: forum shopping in patent cases. The current European system and the U.S. system have seen a rise in forum shopping over the past couple decades, leading to increased appeals, raised litigation costs, reduced certainty for litigants, and the over-concentration of patent cases in just a few forums. This rise of forum shopping in the U.S. and Europe provides valuable lessons for the UPC’s proponents as the UPC moves toward implementation. A comparison of the UPC with the U.S. and European systems reveals that the UPC, in its present form, will likely face similar problems with forum shopping. But several changes to the UPC suggested in this paper will allow that court to better combat forum shopping.
Recommended Citation
Brian Jacobsmeyer,
Forum Shopping in Patent Cases: Lessons for the Unified Patent Court,
25
Mich. Telecomm. & Tech. L. Rev.
131
(2018).
Available at:
https://repository.law.umich.edu/mttlr/vol25/iss1/5
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