The UPC at the Half-Year: Filing & Outcome Trends Through H1 2025

The Unified Patent Court had taken in roughly 883 new cases by the end of May 2025 — the figure carried in the Court's own caseload update — with a further 203 cases drawing an appeal at the Luxembourg Court of Appeal and 76 more on discretionary review, suspensive effect, expedition, or rehearing. Two years after it opened, the headline question is no longer whether litigants will use the UPC. It is how fast the docket is still growing, and where.

This is our mid-year read on the UPC caseload 2025: the official new-case count, set against the filing pace and the decisions our platform has classified through the first half of the year, and what the divisional and technology mix says about who is driving the volume.

UPC caseload 2025: filings are tracking at or above 2024

The official tally is the one to quote for "new cases," and it tells a clear growth story. The UPC reached 700 cases by January 2025 and 883 by the end of May — an addition of roughly 183 cases in the first five months of the year, including 47 in May alone. The Court paused its monthly statistical updates from mid-2025 to migrate to a new case-management system, so the end-of-May snapshot is the cleanest official waypoint for the half-year. On the appellate side, the same update logged 203 cases in which a party had lodged an appeal and 76 cases on discretionary or interlocutory review — a Court of Appeal that has been busy since its first full year.

Our own corpus tracks the same trajectory from a broader angle. Counting every action type tied to a case number — infringement and revocation actions, appeals, revocation counterclaims, and procedural sub-applications — the records we hold by case-number year run 241 in 2023, 1,091 in 2024, and 1,238 in 2025. That raw count is deliberately wider than the Court's "new cases" figure (it sweeps in everything procedural and every counterclaim), so we never present it as filings. But the year-over-year direction is unambiguous: 2025's case-number volume is running ahead of 2024's, not flattening.

The acceleration is sharpest where it matters most — the enforcement core. New infringement actions rose roughly 54% year over year, from about 155 in 2024 to 239 in 2025, and new applications for provisional measures edged up as well (32 to 36). Standalone revocation actions and revocation counterclaims softened slightly, but the enforcement core of the docket clearly expanded. Through mid-2025, in our database, case numbers bearing a /2025 suffix already number well over a thousand across all action types, consistent with a year on pace to match or exceed 2024.

What's driving the volume

The growth is concentrated, not diffuse. Two technology blocs continue to carry the UPC docket, exactly as they did in the Court's first full year.

Among the /2025 main-case records in our corpus with an identified technology field, the Electricity sector — telecom, semiconductors, and electronics — is the largest single bloc, followed by Human Necessities, the pharmaceutical and medical-device cluster, a clear second. At the sub-sector level, telecommunications and pharmaceutical-and-medical inventions are the two busiest fields, with computing-and-AI close behind. Behind that ordering are two recognisable streams: a standards-heavy connectivity docket (the SEP/FRAND disputes between the major handset and network players) running alongside high-value life-sciences fights over things like glucose monitoring, heart valves, and biologics.

The reason both clusters gravitate to the UPC is the same: a single proceeding can produce an injunction spanning multiple European markets at once. That is the remedy telecom and pharma litigants value most, and it is why the half-year filing growth shows up first in those two sectors rather than across the board.

The divisional breakdown — where the H1 work landed

The other structural constant is German dominance. The German local divisions continue to absorb the bulk of first-instance enforcement, with Munich the single busiest local division — by some firm counts taking around 40% of 2025 first-instance claims — trailed by Düsseldorf, Mannheim, The Hague, and Hamburg.

The decisions and orders our platform classified in the first half of 2025 mirror that concentration. The table below counts every record — substantive and procedural — whose first decision date fell between January and June 2025:

Three things stand out. First, Munich and Düsseldorf alone account for a large share of the half-year output, and the four German local divisions together dominate the table — the same near-monopoly on enforcement that defined 2024. Second, the Court of Appeal sits second overall, a direct consequence of nearly every infringement merits decision being appealed; Luxembourg is now a permanent fixture of the docket, not an occasional backstop. Third, the Milan divisions are visibly building a caseload, an early sign that the Italian seats are becoming a real alternative outside the German core.

These 382 records are part of the 741 UPC decisions and orders our platform classified across full-year 2025 — the half-year is the leading edge of a docket that roughly doubled its annual output between 2024 (451 classified) and 2025.

What this means for practitioners

A few practical reads from the half-year.

Forum strategy is still mostly a German question. For enforcement, the live decision in H1 2025 was rarely "Germany or elsewhere?" but "which German division?" — with Munich's volume and Düsseldorf's reputation as the two poles. The Milan and Hague numbers are worth watching, but they have not yet displaced the German core.

Price the settlement, not just the judgment. Settlement remains a common exit at the UPC. Our corpus shows settlements and withdrawals making up a meaningful share of how main cases actually close, with a steady stream resolving before a final merits ruling across pharma, medical devices, and telecom. The realistic base case for many UPC disputes is a negotiated exit under the pressure of a fast, pan-European injunction, not a full merits trial. Any litigation budget should weight that accordingly.

Plan for the appeal. With the Court of Appeal already the second-busiest forum in our half-year table, a first-instance win is a milestone, not the finish line. The early two-year framing from the Court — just over half of decided infringement actions ending in a patent held valid and infringed, about a quarter not infringed, and about a quarter invalid, with a non-trivial share of merits decisions overturned on appeal — is the base rate to plan against. The first half of 2025 is consistent with it, but the merits sample is still maturing.

What to watch

Three threads will define the second half of 2025:

1. Does the filing pace hold? On current pace, full-year 2025 looks set to land at or above 2024 on the official new-case count — but the mid-year pause in monthly statistics for the new case-management system means the next clean official number may not arrive until later in the year. This is a projection from the half-year trajectory, not a Court figure; treat the full-year total as an estimate until the UPC publishes it.

2. Long-arm jurisdiction. Early-2025 rulings testing whether a German-seated division can reach the UK or other non-UPC parts of a European patent are the doctrinal story with the most potential to widen the Court's gravitational pull — and to push filings higher still.

3. Does the map broaden? Milan's rising numbers, plus activity at The Hague and the Nordic-Baltic division, hint at a docket that is slowly decentralising. Whether H2 2025 entrenches the German near-monopoly or genuinely broadens the venue map is the forum-strategy question for the rest of the year.

The half-year verdict is straightforward: the UPC is not just busy, it is still accelerating — concentrated in German divisions, led by telecom and pharma, and increasingly defined by what happens on appeal.

Want the division-by-division and outcome data behind this update? Our platform tracks and classifies every UPC decision as it issues — explore the dataset to benchmark your next filing.

Related reading

• The State of the Unified Patent Court: 2024 in Review
• The State of the Unified Patent Court: 2025 Annual Report
• The 20 Most Active Litigants at the UPC

Sources

• Unified Patent Court — "Case load of the Court since start of operation in June 2023 – update 30 June 2025" (and the 31 May 2025 update), unifiedpatentcourt.org
• 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)
• UPClytics.com — internal dataset of classified UPC decisions (snapshot June 2026 build).