High Court: Patents Court judgments, 2026

In patent case management, the issues for trial should address the pleaded legal questions, rather than an unpleaded decision to seek patent protection. Model…

For the purposes of the supplementary protection certificate regime, “active ingredient” in article 1(b) of Regulation (EC) 469/2009 has the same meaning as…

At a case management conference, a court may defer deciding a complex patent-equivalence pleading where the argument has no practical effect on the evidence…

Internal documents concerning a FRAND licence are not ordinarily disclosed, but limited disclosure may be justified where the licence is central and a…

Parties must plead the material facts, but need not plead the law. A party may therefore advance a legal argument without specifically pleading it, provided…

A patent claim for a wireless-communications system is not obvious merely because each step in a proposed development could be taken. The court must ask…

An overseas claimant’s residence outside the jurisdiction satisfies the residence gateway for security for costs, but does not itself justify an order. The…

For a patent claim covering distinct technical fields, obviousness may be tested from any legitimate skilled team working in a field covered by the claim. Each…

In patent litigation, managing confidential technical information requires a balance between the receiving party’s access to relevant material and protection…

A court may temporarily lift a case-management stay and amend a confidentiality regime where necessary to give practical effect to an appellate order and…

Consequential waiver of litigation privilege resulting from serving a Notice of Experiments in patent proceedings is confined by the experiment deployed and…

In fixing an interim payment pending determination of a global RAND licence, the court should adopt a fair, simple and robust approach without conducting a…

Section 12(7) of the State Immunity Act 1978 excludes only a true action in rem, commenced by service on the res, such as an Admiralty action against a ship or…

Revocation of a patent does not automatically justify summary judgment recording that an infringement counterclaim had no real prospect of success. The court…

In determining FRAND terms for a global SEP cross-licence, the court should begin with the most comparable licence available. A licence to the same portfolio…

A dependent plant variety must satisfy all cumulative requirements in section 7(3) of the Plant Varieties Act 1997. The derived variety must be predominantly…

Where a foreign court requires a litigant to make a statement in proceedings before an English court, the English court may permit that statement as a…

In proceedings to revoke a UK patent, the court may authorise service outside the jurisdiction by an alternative method where there is good reason under CPR…

Section 106 of the Patents Act 1977 does not require the court to consider the parties’ financial positions when approving costs budgets. Costs budgeting…

In costs budgeting, the court approves only costs that are both reasonable and proportionate on an inter partes basis. The exercise concerns the reasonable and…

For an interim RAND licence, the court’s task is to hold the ring pending the final determination, rather than conduct a mini-trial of the ultimate royalty.…

A strike-out application should not be used to obtain an unintended preliminary ruling on difficult statutory construction, particularly where the issue is…

A statement of case must contain a concise statement of the facts relied upon and sufficient detail to enable the opposing party to understand the case…

Expedition of a RAND trial is justified where foreign injunction proceedings create a real possibility that an earlier judgment on licensing entitlement and…