Court Decisions
Whether a patent holds up and how far its claims reach is decided case by case, by the EPO's Boards of Appeal, the Unified Patent Court (UPC) and national courts. In Europe the same patent is often fought over in several of them, e.g. in an opposition appeal at the EPO while an infringement action runs in Düsseldorf. That is why you usually need every decision that concerns a patent, wherever it was made.
So a database can also hold court decisions. You search them, add the ones that matter for your question and read them in full. A patent's page also lists the decisions that concern it, so you see at a glance where it has been challenged or enforced.
Courts we cover#
We cover the EPO's Boards of Appeal, the UPC and the German patent courts, which together makes more than 75,000 decisions:
| Court | What it decides |
|---|---|
| EPO Boards of Appeal | Appeals against decisions of the EPO, e.g. the refusal of an application or the outcome of an opposition |
| Unified Patent Court | Infringement and revocation actions on European patents, in first instance and on appeal |
| Bundespatentgericht | Nullity actions against patents, and appeals against decisions of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office |
| Landgerichte and Oberlandesgerichte | Patent infringement in first instance and on appeal, e.g. in Düsseldorf, München, Mannheim and Hamburg |
| Bundesgerichtshof | Final appeals in both validity and infringement cases |
Be aware that German courts publish only a small share of their decisions, so a case can have been decided without a decision you can find here.
Adding court decisions#
You add court decisions the same way as patents, with the plus button after the page tabs of your database. In the search dialog you search by keywords or by meaning, i.e. you describe what you are looking for in plain language, e.g. when a feature is infringed by equivalent means. Filters narrow the matches by e.g. the court, the date, the file number or the patent a decision concerns.
You can also simply ask a research agent to find the decisions you need, e.g. the case law on a claim term or every decision on a competitor's patent.
Reading a decision#
Open a decision and its page shows the court, the date, the type of decision and the file number of the case, e.g. X ZR 98/24 at the Bundesgerichtshof or UPC_CoA_335/2023 at the UPC. The full text follows, with the court's own headnote where it wrote one. German decisions keep their paragraph numbers (Randnummern), since that is how German practitioners cite a passage.
The page also lists the patent in dispute and the other patents the decision names. Every European or US patent among them links to its own page, so you can open the claims a ruling was about right from the decision.
Decisions and patents#
A patent's page lists the court decisions that concern it. Together with the patent's legal events, that shows how the patent has fared so far.
Be aware that German infringement judgments often leave out the number of the patent in dispute, so such a judgment can be missing from that list. A search by meaning, e.g. with the patent's first claim, helps you find those.
Citing decisions#
You can cite a decision in a note, so a conclusion always carries the ruling it rests on. Agents cite decisions in claim charts as well. When an agent interprets a term of a claim, it looks for decisions that have already dealt with the patent or with the point of law, and cites them right on the term in the chart.
Public pages, API and MCP#
Every decision has a public page that anyone can open without an account, so you can send a colleague or a client the link. Your own code reaches the same decisions through the Data API, and so do Claude and ChatGPT once you connect them to Patalyze over MCP.