Do Patents Survive a Revocation Counterclaim at the UPC?

The last few weeks of UPC reporting have read like a list of casualties. In September the Munich Local Division revoked another Maxell patent in its dispute with Samsung, the third Maxell has lost at the UPC (JUVE Patent). On 27 October JUVE Patent reported that the Court of Appeal had revoked most of Agfa's patent against Gucci, a patent the Hamburg Local Division had left intact at first instance (JUVE Patent). For a patent owner weighing an infringement action, the obvious question is whether the counterclaim for revocation that so often follows is as dangerous as the headlines suggest.

Others have counted UPC validity outcomes before, notably Bardehle Pagenberg and Hoyng Rokh Monegier, and our headline picture is broadly in line with theirs. We wanted to look one step further: what survival is actually worth. We took every first-instance ruling on a revocation counterclaim in our data, 95 rulings to 20 October 2026. That includes rulings where the validity result sits only in the joint judgment on the infringement action, which a count based on counterclaim dockets alone can miss.

Most patents come out alive

The patent survived in some form in 70 of the 95 rulings, roughly three in four. Full revocation is the exception, not the rule.

But survival isn't the same as coming out unscathed. Only about half of the patents (47 of 95) were maintained exactly as granted. The other survivors came out narrower, after the patentee amended the claims or the court revoked part of the patent. That difference matters: a narrower claim can still catch the attacked product, but it can also be the reason the infringement case is lost.

Survival is not winning

Which leads to the second point. Of the 70 patents left standing, infringement was found in 41. In most of the others, the patent held but the defendant's product fell outside its scope. A patentee who "wins" on validity still has to win on infringement. At the UPC's local divisions the two are normally heard together, and the claims are read the same way for both.

Where you file matters

The divisions don't look alike, and here the earlier studies point the same way. Düsseldorf kept the patent as granted in 17 of 23 counterclaim rulings. Munich did so in 7 of 21, and also fully revoked more often. Mannheim sits in between, though nearer Düsseldorf on patents kept as granted. The numbers per division are small, so treat this as a pattern rather than a law of nature: the as-granted gap between Düsseldorf and Munich is large enough to take seriously, while the difference in full revocations could still narrow as more rulings come in.

Most counterclaims never get a ruling

One more piece of context: fewer than half of the counterclaims that have ended so far reached a ruling on validity. Most of the rest were withdrawn, usually along with the infringement action they answered. The court record rarely says why, but a deal between the parties is the likely explanation for many. Seen this way, the counterclaim may often work as leverage as much as a validity attack.

What it means

The headline cases are real, but they aren't the typical first-instance outcome. For a patent owner, the realistic risk of a UPC counterclaim is less "will I lose the patent" and more "will I keep it in a form that still covers what I'm suing over", and that risk depends noticeably on where the case is heard.

Figures cover first-instance rulings on revocation counterclaims from the court's opening in June 2023 to 20 October 2026, including validity decisions given in joint judgments on the infringement action. Where one judgment covers several counterclaim dockets, it counts once. Court of Appeal results are not included, so a first-instance survival can still be reversed on appeal, as Agfa's largely was. "Survived" means anything other than full revocation; partial revocation and maintenance in amended form are counted together as survival in narrower form.