Meet the Judges of the Unified Patent Court: Panel Composition and Ruling Tendencies
Our database identifies 141 UPC judges, but a small core hears most of the work. Meet the Munich bench and the Court of Appeal panel behind the landmarks.
Our platform identifies 141 UPC judges who have sat on a Unified Patent Court matter since the Court opened in June 2023 — but the docket is not spread evenly across them. A small core, concentrated at the busiest German local divisions and on the Court of Appeal in Luxembourg, hears a disproportionate share of the substantive work. If you want to know who is likely to decide your case, the honest answer is that the field of relevant UPC judges is far smaller than the headcount suggests. This is our read on who that core is, how panels are built, and what the aggregate data does — and does not — say about how they rule.
Who decides your UPC case: a concentrated bench
Across the roughly 1,800 substantive main cases and 1,028 procedural sub-applications our platform has classified, the most active legally-qualified judges are a recognisable group: the presiding figures at Munich and the standing members of the Court of Appeal panels. The table below ranks them by the number of case records each is associated with in our corpus.
| Judge | Primary division | Appearances (our data) |
|---|---|---|
| Matthias Zigann | Munich Local Division | 351 |
| Tobias Pichlmaier | Munich Local Division | 319 |
| Ingeborg Simonsson | Court of Appeal | 291 |
| Rian Kalden | Court of Appeal | 285 |
| Patricia Rombach | Court of Appeal | 274 |
| Peter Tochtermann | Mannheim / Munich / Paris | 269 |
| Andras Kupecz | Brussels / Düsseldorf / Hamburg | 251 |
| Klaus Grabinski | Court of Appeal | 205 |
| Peter Blok | Court of Appeal | 185 |
| Emmanuel Gougé | Court of Appeal | 161 |
Appearance counts include every action type tied to a case — main actions, counterclaims, appeals and procedural orders — so they index a judge's overall footprint, not a count of merits judgments. They measure activity, not outcomes.
A note on method and data protection: French law restricts the analytics-style profiling of individual judges. We therefore name a judge only where at least one of their divisions sits outside France — every judge above is a Court of Appeal member or sits across multiple divisions, so all are nameable. Judges who sit only on the Paris-seated divisions we report in aggregate, as "the Paris bench," and never single out by name; the Paris Local Division and the Paris seat of the Central Division are active venues in our corpus, but the individuals there are presented only at the division level.
How a UPC panel is built: multinational by design
The UPC's defining structural feature is that almost no case is decided by a single judge of a single nationality. At the Court of First Instance, a local or regional division sits as three legally-qualified judges of different nationalities — typically one national of the host state and two from other Contracting Member States, drawn from a shared Pool of Judges. A technically-qualified judge is added on a party's request, and as a matter of course where a counterclaim for revocation is in play — which is why so many UPC merits panels are effectively four-strong (Article 8 UPCA; official UPC court presentation). The Central Division sits as two legally-qualified judges of different nationalities plus one technically-qualified judge.
On appeal, the panels grow. A standard Court of Appeal panel sits as five judges — three legally-qualified judges of different Contracting Member States plus two technically-qualified judges in the relevant field (in a pure revocation appeal the technical members may be omitted). The upshot is that the UPC bakes cross-border perspective into the bench itself: a Munich panel hearing a German defendant still carries non-German judges, and an appeal pulls in technical expertise alongside the law.
The Munich bench: the busiest local division
The Munich Local Division is the highest-volume first-instance venue in our corpus — 626 case records, ahead of every other local division. It is presided over by Matthias Zigann, a former presiding judge of the Munich Regional Court's patent chamber, whose 351 appearances make him the single most frequently-recorded judge on our platform. Alongside him, Tobias Pichlmaier (319) is a fixture of the Munich panels, and cross-division judge Andras Kupecz — who also sits at Brussels, Düsseldorf and Hamburg — rounds out the Munich core in our data, with a French technically-qualified judge frequently completing the panel.
What does the aggregate data suggest about Munich's posture? Our preliminary-injunction analytics show Munich granting preliminary injunctions in a clear majority of contested applications — in the mid-50s to high-60s percent range — which has earned it a reputation as a patentee-receptive forum for urgent relief. We are deliberate about how we frame that. The data shows a grant-rate pattern, not a judicial preference: it reflects the cases that reach Munich, the standard the division applies to urgency, and the evidence litigants put in, as much as anything about the judges. We do not assert that any judge "favours patentees" — only that, on the applications we have classified, Munich's grant rate sits at the higher end of the divisional spread.
The Court of Appeal core: who harmonises the law
If the Munich bench shapes first-instance enforcement, the Court of Appeal in Luxembourg sets the rules everyone else applies — and its standing membership is small and, by design, stable. Klaus Grabinski, President of the Unified Patent Court, presides over the first panel; Rian Kalden, a Dutch judge who left the Hague Court of Appeal to join the UPC full-time, presides over the second. The other recurring legally-qualified members in our data are Ingeborg Simonsson (Sweden), Patricia Rombach (Germany), Peter Blok (Netherlands) and Emmanuel Gougé (France) — a deliberately multinational appellate bench. The Court is adding a third panel around the turn of the year to absorb rising volume, but through 2025 it is the first and second panels that decided the cases that matter.
These are the judges who actually move the law — and on 25 November 2025, they did so twice in one day.
The 25 November 2025 landmarks: the CoA core in action
On a single day, the two Court of Appeal panels handed down coordinated decisions that laid the foundations of the UPC's own doctrine on inventive step and sufficiency of disclosure. The second panel (Kalden presiding) decided Amgen v. Sanofi/Regeneron, on antibody patents for lowering cholesterol, overturning the first-instance revocation and holding the patent valid. The first panel — Grabinski presiding, Peter Blok as judge-rapporteur, with Emmanuel Gougé and technically-qualified judges — decided Meril v. Edwards, on a transcatheter heart valve, upholding both validity and the finding of infringement against Meril (Bird & Bird; EIP).
Commentators read the two rulings as plainly coordinated — large sections of the reasoning are common to both, and the headnotes track each other. Together they articulated a UPC test for inventive step that, while drawing on the EPO's problem-solution approach, departs from it: asking whether the skilled person would (not merely could) have arrived at the claimed solution from a realistic starting point, given a concrete pointer or motivation. On sufficiency, the Court confirmed that disclosing at least one way of performing the invention — a reasonable amount of trial and error permitted — suffices (Bird & Bird; Pinsent Masons; Bristows). The point for our purposes is concrete: the doctrine that now governs validity across 18 states was written by the same handful of named appellate judges who top our activity table. Knowing who they are is not trivia — it is the closest thing the UPC offers to a read on how the law will develop.
Two cautions govern how to read all of this. Appearance counts are activity, not outcomes — a judge near the top of our table is someone you are statistically likely to encounter, not someone with a knowable "win rate," and we report divisional patterns rather than scoring individuals. And the picture is partial by design: because we aggregate the Paris-seated bench, the named field here is real but incomplete and skews toward the German divisions and the Court of Appeal. As a map of who is most active and how their division tends to rule, the data is solid; as a prediction of how a specific judge will decide a specific case, it is a starting point.
What to watch
Three things will shape the UPC bench through 2026. Capacity: the third Court of Appeal panel the Court is standing up will redistribute appellate work, so our activity rankings among the CoA core should shift — worth re-checking which names rise. Doctrinal follow-through: the 25 November framework on inventive step and sufficiency is a foundation, not the last word, and the same first- and second-panel judges will spend 2026 applying it case by case, including to the long-arm-jurisdiction questions the Court has referred to the CJEU. Divisional spread: as the per-division pools grow past the modest samples behind today's preliminary injunction rates, the gap between Munich's posture and the rest should either firm up or narrow.
The durable takeaway: at the UPC, a small, identifiable core decides a large share of what matters. Know the bench before you file.
Related reading
- Where Should You File? UPC Preliminary Injunction Grant Rates by Division
- The UPC in 2025: Five Decisions That Reshaped European Patent Litigation
- UPC Firm Scorecards: Who's Winning the Most Patent Battles in Europe
Want to see the panel likely to hear your case — its members, its division's grant rates and its time-to-decision — before you file? That is what UPClytics is built for. Explore the data.
Sources
- Bird & Bird, "UPC Court of Appeal: two landmark decisions — what 5 things do you need to know" — https://cm.twobirds.com/en/insights/2026/upc-court-of-appeal--two-landmark-decisions-what-5-things-do-you-need-to-know
- EIP, "UPC Court of Appeal clarifies inventive step, claim construction and procedural issues in Amgen v. Sanofi and Meril v. Edwards" — https://eip.com/uk/case-reports/upc-court-of-appeal-sets-out-comprehensive-guidance-on-key-substantive-issues
- Pinsent Masons (Out-Law), "UPC Court of Appeal sets test for assessing 'inventive step'" — https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/upc-court-appeal-inventive-step-test
- Bristows, "Sanofi & Regeneron v Amgen — 7 takeaways from the UPC Court of Appeal" — https://inquisitiveminds.bristows.com/post/102lwgw/sanofi-regeneron-v-amgen-7-takeaways-from-the-upc-court-of-appeal
- Official UPC, court presentation and panel composition (Article 8 UPCA) — https://www.unifiedpatentcourt.org/en/court/presentation
- UPClytics.com — internal dataset of classified UPC decisions (snapshot June 2026 build).