The State of the Unified Patent Court: 2024 in Review
UPC statistics 2024: 633 actions in its first full year, German divisions dominant, telecom and pharma leading, and the first wave of outcomes.
In its first full calendar year, the Unified Patent Court took in roughly 633 actions through 31 December 2024 — the figure the Court reported in its inaugural annual report covering the period since it opened on 1 June 2023. That headline tells you the UPC has arrived as a serious venue. The more useful story for litigators is underneath it: which divisions are absorbing the work, which technologies are driving the docket, and what the earliest merits decisions say about who wins.
This is our read on the UPC statistics 2024 left behind — the official caseload, the decisions our platform has classified, and what to watch as the Court moves into year two.
UPC statistics 2024: the caseload took off
The contrast with 2023 is stark. The UPC's partial first half-year produced a trickle; 2024 produced a flood. By the Court's own count, it had registered around 633 actions by the end of December 2024 — the bulk of that volume landing in 2024 itself.
Our own corpus shows the same trajectory from the output side. Counting every action type tied to a case number — including appeals, revocation counterclaims, and procedural sub-applications — the records we hold jumped from 241 in 2023 to 1,091 in 2024, a more than four-fold increase. That raw count is deliberately broader than the Court's "new cases" tally (it sweeps in everything procedural), so we don't present it as filings. But the direction is unambiguous: the UPC went from pilot to production in twelve months.
On the output side, our platform classified 451 UPC decisions and orders issued in 2024 — up from 58 the year before. Of those, 141 attached to substantive main cases and 310 were procedural orders, the connective tissue of an active docket.
The case-type mix in the UPC statistics 2024: infringement leads, revocation rides shotgun
The UPC was designed as an enforcement court, and the 2024 numbers confirm it behaved like one. Infringement actions formed the largest slice of substantive filings, and most of them drew a revocation counterclaim in return — the now-familiar UPC pattern where the defendant attacks the patent in the same proceeding rather than running a separate nullity action.
The Court's own annual report puts numbers on that pattern: 71% of infringement actions involved a counterclaim for revocation, while only 9% of revocation actions drew an infringement counterclaim — validity is the defendant's weapon of choice.
Among the substantive 2024 decisions we classified, the same hierarchy holds:
| Case category (2024 main-case decisions) | Count |
|---|---|
| Appeals | 49 |
| Infringement | 30 |
| Provisional measures | 28 |
| Revocation | 17 |
| Other | 17 |
| Total substantive | 141 |
| (plus procedural orders) | 310 |
The volume of appeals is its own signal. With nearly every merits decision on infringement being appealed, the Luxembourg Court of Appeal was busy from day one — a dynamic that shaped the docket throughout 2024 and intensified into 2025.
Division concentration: Germany ran the table
If there is one structural fact every UPC litigant should internalise, it is that the German local divisions dominate. By the Court's own report, around 85% of UPC infringement actions in 2024 started in a German local division, with Munich, Düsseldorf, Mannheim, and Hamburg doing the heavy lifting. Munich LD was the single busiest local division for infringement.
The decisions we classified in 2024 mirror that concentration:
| Division | 2024 decisions classified |
|---|---|
| Munich LD | 95 |
| Court of Appeal | 94 |
| Düsseldorf LD | 68 |
| Paris CD | 47 |
| Mannheim LD | 33 |
| Paris LD | 24 |
| Hamburg LD | 22 |
| The Hague LD | 17 |
| Milan LD | 16 |
| Other divisions | 33 |
Munich and Düsseldorf alone account for the largest share of substantive output, and the four German local divisions together make up roughly half of all decisions in our corpus — a figure that climbs sharply once you isolate infringement, where the German concentration is heavier still. Paris Central stands out as the principal home for standalone revocation actions, the venue of choice for parties looking to clear a patent rather than enforce one.
The takeaway for forum strategy is blunt: for most enforcement, the practical question in 2024 was not "Germany or elsewhere?" but "which German division?"
Technology mix: telecom out front, pharma a clear second
The UPC's 2024 docket leaned heavily on electronics and communications. Across the decisions we classified, the Electricity sector — telecom, semiconductors, and electronics — accounted for about 45% of cases with an identified field, the largest single bloc. Human Necessities, the pharma and medical-device cluster, came second at roughly 20%. The Court's own report orders its docket the same way, with IPC class H (electricity) first, followed by human necessities and physics — an ICT-led caseload trailed by medical technology.
Drilling into sub-sectors, computing and AI, telecommunications, and pharmaceutical and medical inventions were the busiest fields in our 2024 set. The pattern reflects who is actually fighting at the UPC: standards-heavy connectivity disputes and high-value life-sciences cases, the two categories with the most to gain from a single injunction spanning multiple European markets.
That multi-market reach is what made 2024 matter. When LD Mannheim issued the UPC's first substantive SEP/FRAND decision in Panasonic v. OPPO on 22 November 2024 — with an injunction reaching Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden — it showed the Court delivering precisely the cross-border remedy that draws telecom litigants in the first place.
The first wave of outcomes
2024 was also the year the UPC started deciding cases on the merits, beginning with its first merits decision in July. The samples are small and the early appeals are still working through Luxembourg, so these are first-wave signals, not settled base rates.
Among the substantive 2024 decisions we classified, preliminary injunctions were granted 17 times and refused 12 — a better-than-even early grant rate, with the well-known divisional spread between a stricter Munich and a more grant-friendly Düsseldorf. On the merits, our 2024 set records 8 findings of infringement, 7 patents revoked, plus a handful maintained, amended, or partially revoked — alongside 7 settlements and a meaningful number of dismissals and cost-only orders.
The lesson our 2024 set teaches is the one that holds across the data: patentees who reach a merits decision do reasonably well, but validity falls in a substantial share of cases. The Court's own later two-year framing tells it in round numbers — just over half of infringement actions ending in a patent held valid and infringed, about a quarter not infringed, and about a quarter invalid. The 2024 data is the leading edge of that trend, not the full curve.
What to watch in 2025
Four threads from 2024 will define the year ahead:
- The appeal wave breaks. With nearly every infringement merits decision appealed, 2025 is when the Court of Appeal starts setting binding doctrine — and when we learn how often first-instance results survive.
- FRAND moves from first decision to framework. Panasonic v. OPPO opened the door; watch whether the UPC consolidates a coherent, market-spanning approach to SEP injunctions.
- Long-arm jurisdiction. Early-2025 rulings on whether a German-seated division can reach the UK or other non-UPC parts of a European patent could expand the Court's gravitational pull well beyond its member states.
- Does the German near-monopoly soften? Milan, The Hague, and the Nordic-Baltic division are building dockets. Whether 2025 broadens the map, or further entrenches Germany, is the forum-strategy question of the year.
The UPC's first full year settled the existential question — practitioners are filing, and the Court is deciding. 2025 is where the case law that governs European patent enforcement for the next decade gets written.
Want the division-by-division and outcome data behind this report? Our platform tracks and classifies every UPC decision as it issues — explore the dataset to benchmark your next filing.
Related reading
- How the Unified Patent Court Works: A Litigator's Guide to Divisions, Timelines & Outcomes
- Where Should You File? UPC Preliminary Injunction Grant Rates by Division
Sources
- Unified Patent Court — first annual report (2024), unifiedpatentcourt.org
- Boult Wade Tennant — "The UPC's first annual report – a brief overview" (https://www.boult.com/bulletin/upcs-first-annual-report-a-brief-overview/)
- Bird & Bird — "The Unified Patent Court (UPC) at 21 months" (https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2025/the-unified-patent-court-(upc)-at-21-months)
- Metida — "UPC Annual Report 2024: Key Insights and Future Developments" (https://metida.com/upc-annual-report/)
- UPClytics.com — internal dataset of classified UPC decisions (snapshot June 2026 build).