The State Bar of Texas held its Annual Meeting in Dallas, Texas from June 20-21, 2012 at the Hilton Anatole. The Intellectual Property track of the State Bar of Texas covered a variety of topics from trademarks and counterfeiting to European oppositions. The most resounding takeaway for me came from the last session during a presentation on European oppositions, and it addressed the Unified Patent Court. With the Unified Patent Court agreement having been signed in February of this year, the speaker stressed that attorneys should counsel their clients to reevaluate their European patent portfolios in order to decide which of their patents are important and/or valuable enough to “opt-out” of the Unified Patent Court’s jurisdiction.

The attorney stressed he believed that, if the patent is valuable enough, the client should consider paying the flat fee to remove the patent from the court’s jurisdiction. Otherwise, there is the risk that the court may find the patent invalid, and the owner is left with a patent that is unenforceable across all of Europe.

As it stands, there are still too many questions that surround the Unified Patent Court. Who is to train the judges? Where do the appeals go? How do the appeals work? With all these questions unanswered, it may still be much more prudent to look towards advising clients with important patent portfolios to opt out of the fledging court’s jurisdiction.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Patent_Court

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