The Unified Patent Court (UPC) has jurisdiction over disputes involving European patents in the territory of 18 (currently) member states of the European Union. The UPC was established by the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court (UPCA), which entered into force on June 1st, 2023.
As it could have been expected due to its practical advantage, English is the most common language in front of the UPC: the latest count (as of the end of January 2025) shows 54% of proceedings conducted in English in the first instance. This notwithstanding that no UPC body is established in an English-speaking country (Malta, the only country having English as an official language and ratified the UPCA, has not set up any local division on its territory).
Article 49(2) of the UPCA, however, allows each Contracting State to use one or more of the languages of the European Patent Office (German, English and French) as the language of proceedings for the local division(s) established on its territory. All the States concerned have then chosen to provide for English as an authorized language of proceedings before their local division(s), in addition to at least one local official language each time, as required by Article 49(1) of the UPCA. Only the Nordic-Baltic regional division uses English exclusively, as allowed by this same article.
German, meanwhile, is used in more than a third of proceedings to date, likely due to the number of German and Austrian local divisions (there are four local divisions in Germany, which is the only country to host more than one local division) and the dynamism of the German patent ecosystem. Interestingly, German was even the most common language of proceedings during the first months of operation of the UPC.
Of course, proceedings conducted in German do not only involve natural or legal persons having their domicile in Germany or Austria; on the contrary, defendants from all over the world may find themselves involved in proceedings in German. This perhaps less expected situation is permitted by Rule 14.2 a) of the UPC Rules of Procedure which, in most cases, gives the claimant the choice of the language of proceedings among those authorized before the local division where the action is brought.
The only exception would be a defendant who commits allegedly infringing acts only in the Contracting State where he has its domicile: Rule 14.2 b) then provides for the use of the official language of that Contracting State, or the defendant's regional language. Thus, most of the time, it is rather the claimant who decides the language of proceedings before a local division.
In case ACT_581538/2023, for example, the claimant chose Dutch to sue a Spanish manufacturer and its Belgian distributor (located in the Walloon Region) before Brussels local division. As provided for in Article 49(5) UPCA, the defendants requested to change the language of the proceedings into English (the language in which the concerned European patent was granted), unsuccessfully.
For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that, in this situation, the defendant may request a translation of the statement of claim in accordance with Rule 271 § 7 of the Rules of Procedure of the UPC, in conformity with Union law (Regulation (EU) 2020/1784, Articles 12(2) and 12(3)).
This is by the way an important practical point: in the event the defendant refuses service because they do not understand the language in which the statement of claim is written, it is only from the date a translation of the statement of claim is served that the (short) 3-month period granted to the defendant to file their statement of defence begins to run.
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