UPC Firm Scorecards: Who's Winning the Most Patent Battles in Europe

A handful of firms dominate representation at the Unified Patent Court. Our platform tracks 297 distinct law firms that have appeared on a UPC matter since the Court opened in June 2023 — but the work is heavily concentrated. The single most active firm in our corpus, Bardehle Pagenberg, is named on more case records than any other firm; the top six firms together appear far more often than the rest of the field combined. If you are a managing partner benchmarking your practice, or a general counsel choosing UPC counsel, the first thing the data tells you is that the field of firms with serious, repeated UPC experience is much smaller than the headline number suggests.

A necessary caveat up front, because the title invites it: activity is not the same as winning. Appearance counts measure how much UPC work a firm does, not its win rate — and they cannot, because the firm on a winning case is often opposite another firm on the same case, and a single matter generates wins and losses on different issues (infringement found, patent partly revoked). Where we touch outcomes below, we frame them strictly as what our classified data shows, with the sample caveats attached. This is our read on who the UPC's busiest firms are, how they split between German litigation powerhouses, international full-service outfits and patent-attorney specialists, and which side of the docket each tends to sit on.

The best UPC law firms by appearance count

The table below ranks the most active firms by the number of case records each is associated with across our corpus — every claimant-side and respondent-side appearance our platform has classified, including appeals and procedural sub-applications. "Lean" is computed separately, from the subset of cases where we could attribute a firm to a specific side (claimant vs. respondent); it is directional, not a win record.

Appearance bands are from our firms dataset; lean percentages are computed from the cases where a firm could be attributed to a side. Both are descriptive, not a measure of success.

Three kinds of firm dominate the UPC

Read down the list and a structure emerges that mirrors how the UPC market itself is organised: a standing contest between German boutiques and internationally integrated firms, with the two camps still close to neck and neck at the top. Our appearance data resolves into three archetypes.

German patent-litigation powerhouses. Bardehle Pagenberg and Kather Augenstein sit first and third in our counts, and they are the purest expression of the German model: IP-only firms, often combining patent attorneys and litigators under one roof, built on decades of Düsseldorf- and Munich-school infringement practice. Both came out of the gate filing among the highest number of active lawsuits of any firms in the UPC's first year — a head start our cumulative counts still reflect. This camp also includes the names just outside our top tier: Wildanger, Grünecker, Hoffmann Eitle, Arnold Ruess and the patent-attorney specialists Peterreins Schley, Vossius and Eisenführ Speiser.

International full-service heavyweights. Bird & Bird, Hogan Lovells, Taylor Wessing, Freshfields, Simmons & Simmons and Clifford Chance bring the other model: integrated cross-border teams able to run a pan-European campaign — and to coordinate with parallel proceedings in the UK, which sits outside the UPC. Bird & Bird and Hogan Lovells are the exemplars of the internationally integrated camp; both built mixed lawyer-and-patent-attorney teams early, which is why an English- or US-headquartered firm shows up so high in a German-centred court.

Patent-attorney and pan-European IP specialists. Carpmaels & Ransford and Powell Gilbert — both UK firms — and Hoyng Rokh Monegier, a pan-European IP boutique, round out the leaders. Their UPC presence, despite the UK's non-membership, underlines how much UPC work is won on patent-attorney expertise and how routinely UK firms partner into continental matters. Quinn Emanuel is the outlier archetype: a US disputes powerhouse that has translated its SEP-litigation muscle into a busy, almost entirely defense-side UPC practice.

Claimant-side vs. respondent-side: who attacks, who defends

The most useful proprietary cut we can add is each firm's posture — whether it shows up bringing actions or defending them. We computed this from the claimant- and respondent-representative fields across every case we could attribute, and the pattern is sharp and consistent with how the market describes these firms.

Claimant-leaning (enforcement)        Respondent-leaning (defense)
─────────────────────────────         ────────────────────────────
Kather Augenstein   ~74% claimant     Quinn Emanuel      ~27% claimant
Simmons & Simmons   ~70% claimant     Hogan Lovells      ~28% claimant
Powell Gilbert      ~65% claimant     Freshfields        ~30% claimant
Bird & Bird         ~59% claimant     Taylor Wessing     ~39% claimant
Bardehle Pagenberg  ~51% (balanced)   Hoyng Rokh Monegier ~41% claimant

The split is not random — it tracks the clients a firm holds. Our data puts Kather Augenstein and Simmons & Simmons as the two most claimant-heavy of the leaders, the boutiques that most consistently bring actions. On the defense side, Hogan Lovells, Freshfields and Bird & Bird carry a pronounced respondent tilt, anchored in their work for implementers in the mobile-communications and tech sectors. Quinn Emanuel's near-pure defense posture fits its book of implementer-side SEP work.

For a GC, this is the actionable layer: a firm's lean is a proxy for the muscle it exercises most. If you are the patentee planning an enforcement campaign, the claimant-heavy boutiques have run that play more often; if you are an implementer bracing for an SEP assault, the defense-side specialists do that work week in, week out. Posture predicts the playbook.

Sector specialisation: pharma and medtech vs. telecom and SEP

The leaders are not interchangeable across technologies, and the divide between life sciences and connectivity is the clearest one in the market. The representative work the parties are repeatedly named on bears it out:

• Pharma and biotech. Bardehle (Amgen v. Sanofi, on the PCSK9 antibodies), Freshfields (defending the pharma research industry), Simmons & Simmons (biotech, including Plant-e) and the UK patent-attorney firms Carpmaels & Ransford and Powell Gilbert cluster here. This is where patent-attorney depth and EPO-opposition experience matter most.
• Medical devices. Taylor Wessing (the Abbott/Dexcom continuous-glucose-monitoring dispute, which spawned a cluster of related cases), Hogan Lovells (Meril Life Sciences against Edwards in the heart-valve litigation) and Kather Augenstein (Advanced Bionics) are recurrent names in the medtech rivalries that have produced several of the UPC's landmark merits decisions.
• Telecom and SEP. Kather Augenstein (Panasonic against OPPO and Xiaomi), Bird & Bird and Quinn Emanuel anchor the standard-essential-patent and mobile-communications docket — the densest source of cross-border injunction fights and the cases pushing the open FRAND-jurisdiction question.

None of this is exclusive — every leading firm does some of everything — but the centre of gravity differs, and it is visible in both the cases they are known for and the parties they repeatedly represent.

What this means for managing partners and GCs

A few takeaways the scorecard supports:

• Benchmark against the right cohort. For a managing partner, the meaningful peer set is the dozen or so firms with triple-digit or near-triple-digit appearance counts, not the 297-firm field. The gap between the top six and the rest is the gap between a UPC-core practice and an occasional one.
• Match the firm's lean to your posture. A claimant-heavy boutique and a defense-heavy international firm are not substitutes; pick for the side you will be on and the technology in dispute, not for the brand alone.
• Mind the German centre of gravity — but not exclusively. The busiest divisions are the German local divisions (see our judges analysis), which is why German boutiques top the counts. But the high placement of UK- and US-headquartered firms shows that cross-border coordination, especially with UK parallel proceedings, is its own scarce skill.
• Read activity as experience, not endorsement. A high appearance count means a firm has seen the UPC's procedure repeatedly and knows its judges and rhythms. It does not, on its own, tell you the firm's win rate — for that you need outcome data on the specific division, judge and case type, which is a different question from "who is busiest."

What to watch

Three forces will move these rankings as the UPC enters its fourth year. First, market consolidation and spin-offs — new specialist boutiques (Pentarc, Bonabry) have broken off from larger practices, and the rapid rise of firms like Arnold Ruess shows the league table is not fixed at the top. Second, the SEP/FRAND venue question — every clarification on whether the UPC will set FRAND terms shifts work toward the telecom-focused firms on both the licensor and implementer sides. Third, the long-arm jurisdiction line of cases, now before the CJEU, which could enlarge the UPC's cross-border reach and reward precisely the internationally integrated firms built to run continent-wide campaigns. We update these counts as new decisions are classified.

Want the full appearance profile for a specific firm — the divisions, the judges, the clients, and the outcomes behind the counts? That is exactly what our entity analytics are built to surface.

Related reading

• The 20 Most Active Litigants at the Unified Patent Court
• Meet the Judges of the UPC: Panel Composition & Ruling Tendencies
• Where Should You File? UPC Preliminary Injunction Grant Rates by Division

Sources

• UPClytics.com — internal dataset of classified UPC decisions (snapshot June 2026 build).