18th draft of UPC rules "well received"

Via William Jensen (Marks&Clerk solicitors) comes this link to some exciting news for those who are itching to get litigating in Europe's experimental Unified Patent Court (UPC). This latest information reads thus:

10th meeting of the Preparatory Committee - 10 July 2015

 Published: Thursday, 16 July 2015 10:29

The 10th meeting of the Preparatory Committee was held at the Hungarian Permanent Representation to the European Union at the 10th of July. At the meeting the 18th draft of the Rules of Procedure were presented by Johannes Karcher, coordinator of the Legal Framework working group, and Kevin Mooney, Chair of the Drafting Committee. The draft was very well received by the Committee and even if there is one or two items still to settle it was concluded that the Committee expect to agree on a final set of Rules at its meeting in October. The Committee then went on to agree the draft Protocol on Provisional Application of parts of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court. The Protocol will be opened for signature in the autumn at a date later to be announced.

The Committee also discussed the salary package of the judges, the privileges and immunities of the UPC and the division of costs and responsibilities of the UPC and the hosting Member States. Neil Feinson, coordinator for the IT workstream also confirmed that the contracts for the IT work had been awarded to T-Systems for the hosting work, Miggle for development of the website and Net Services Spa for the case management development.

The next meeting of the Committee will take place on 3 September 2015.

Frustratingly, there was neither a link to the 18th draft nor a conveniently attached Word or pdf document, which leaves us all wondering what the 18th draft looks like. This blogger has no doubt that many people will be sad to see the back of the 17th draft, with which they have been gradually familiarising themselves; he hopes that, if the 17th and 18th drafts are not entirely dissimilar -- as he suspects will be the case -- someone will prepare a handy concordance.

Pierre's guidelines: a new, improved version

Back in September, this blog drew the attention of readers to Unified Patent Court - Draft Rules of Procedure is a 306-page handbook, which includes the Agreement in the three official languages of English, French and German. At that time it was announced that a German version of the Draft Rules was being prepared by the law firm Reimann Osterrieth Köhler Haft and that the UK's Powell Gilbert was also named in this venture, which appears to be masterminded by French avocat Pierre Véron.

Piere has now told us that improved version of the handbook comprising a trilingual version of the 19 February 2013 rules in English and French has been added to the website at www.upc.documents.eu.com: it includes hypertext links to the legal documents referred to in the Agreement (e.g. Regulations on European Patent with Unitary Effect, Lugano Convention), internal hypertext links for cross references, as well as bookmarks for easier navigation. The direct link to this version is here (for ease of use, you can download this PDF file onto your computer and open it locally with Adobe Reader).

A fully trilingual version, including the draft Rules of Procedure in German, should now be available in November.