NIPC Law

Sarah Stierch / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) Jane Lambert Patents Court (Mr Justice Birss)    Facebook Ireland Ltd v Voxer IP LLC [2020] EWHC 1806 (Pat) (7 July 2020) Yesterday, I explained in International Patent Litigation - Nicoventures Trading Ltd v Philip Morris   16 July 2020 that defendants to German patent infringement claims often bring actions to revoke the UK designation of the same European patent because it is not possible to challenge the validity of a patent in infringement proceedings in Germany.  The thinking behind that strategy is the courts in countries that are party to the European Patent Convention take account of each other's decisions on the same patent.  That strategy works, however, only if the UK revocation action is decided before the German infringement one.   To ensure that it does, the court may have to order the expedition of the UK trial as it did in    Nicoventures...

Leeds Law Courts (c) 2005 Jane Lambert: all rights reserved Jane Lambert Until the Civil Procedure Rules ( "CPR" ) came into force in 1999 solicitors specializing in intellectual property law heralded litigation with an ultimatum called a letter before action . Written in haughty if not insulting terms and accompanied by a humiliating form of undertakings, they were intended to shock the recipient into submission. They rarely achieved the desired result. As often as not they were simply ignored.  Occasionally, they were answered by a defiant response.  As a result, a lot of actions were launched that could easily have been settled without recourse to litigation. As I wrote in Dispute Resolution   all that was supposed to change with the introduction of Pre-Action Protocols and the Practice Direction-Pre-Action Conduct and Protocols : "The objective of the Practice Direction and the Pre-Action Protocols is to enable the parties to identify the ...