This article was printed prior to the UK announcing its intention to ratify the UPC. It was first published in IAM Magazine, December 2016.

The decision by UK voters to leave the European Union has thrown plans for the Unified Patent Court into chaos. Specialists from three top European law firms discuss what is likely to happen now, as well as other key issues.

Finally, after years of discussion and disagreement over Europe’s proposed Unified Patent Court (UPC) regime, it looked as if we were reaching the endgame. The United Kingdom was due to ratify the agreement creating the UPC and the EU unitary patent some time over Summer 2016, with Germany to follow by the end of the year – it was estimated that everything would be up and running by mid-April 2017. Then in June 2016 came the UK’s Brexit bombshell. Now, nobody knows what will happen next.

To try to shed more light on where things stand and what the future might hold, IAM brought together a group of leading lawyers – Sofia Willquist and Julia Mannesson of Awapatent in Sweden; Alan Johnson and Dominic Adair of Bristows in the United Kingdom; and Gottfried Schüll and Christoph Walke of Cohausz & Florack in Germany – to look at the possibilities. However, they did not confine themselves to the UPC – there is plenty more going on in Europe as well.

Read full article on the IAM website here.