UPC Court of Appeal grants language proceedings shift to English

On 17 April, the Court of Appeal of the Unified Patent Court issued a decision regarding the change of language of proceedings at the request of one of the parties in a dispute under its jurisdiction.

The case UPC_CoA_101/2024 involves a dispute in the local division of Düsseldorf between two US companies, 10X Genomics and Curio Bioscience, centring on the alleged infringement of Genomic's European patent EP2697391, which covers a method and product for the localised detection of nucleic acid in tissue samples.

However, the UPC Court of Appeal’s decision focused on Curio Bioscience's application to change the language of the UPC proceedings. Although this request was based on Article 49(5) of the Unified Patent Court Agreement (2013/C 175/01), which allows the language to be changed to that of the patent at the discretion of the President of the Court of First Instance on basis of fairness, the Court of First Instance rejected it. 

The Court of Appeal emphasised that in such cases relevant circumstances must be taken into account so as to determine the fairness of the change of language of proceedings, such as:

·The language most commonly used in the technological field involved and the language in which the evidence is drafted.

·The nationality or domicile of the parties. Both parties must be able to understand what is being presented on their behalf and by the other party.

·The size of the parties. A large multinational company with a solid legal team may be better able to handle multilingual disputes than a small company with limited resources and a presence in only a few markets.

How the change of language will affect the progress of the case and any delays it may cause, especially in urgent cases.

In cases where the interests are equally balanced, the position of the defendant is the decisive factor since the claimant already has had the chance to set several relevant aspects of the dispute (e.g. where and when the claim is brought, choice of language of proceedings, language of the patent object of the dispute).

Having considered all these circumstances, the Court decided to grant Curio Bioscience's request to change the language of the proceedings to English. After all, both companies are American, which suggests that English is the natural working language for both. Furthermore, as the technological field and most of the evidence submitted by both parties is in English the use of this language for the proceedings would facilitate the understanding and handling of the evidence. However, although Curio Bioscience argued that it was a much smaller company than 10x Genomics, the Court of Appeal did not consider this to be a decisive factor in the case.