A great honor for Klaus Grabinski: The 60-year-old from the Rhineland was appointed judge at the Court of Appeal of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) this week and was directly elected the first president of the newly created institution in Luxembourg for a period of three years .
This fulfills the wish of many European patent lawyers from commercial law firms and industry, for whom Grabinski has been the big favorite for the prestigious position for years.
Marcus Young
Editor in Business.
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So far, the lawyer has been deputy chairman of the tenth civil senate at the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) in Karlsruhe, which deals primarily with patent and utility model disputes and patent nullity matters.
Grabinski has been a member of the "Patent Senate" for more than 13 years and was involved in groundbreaking judgments.
Grabinski began his career as a judge in 1995 at the District Court of Düsseldorf, whose civil division is considered the leader in patent disputes in Germany.
After his probation in the Higher Regional Court, Grabinski took over the chairmanship of a chamber for patent matters in Düsseldorf in 2002.
The decisions of the local and regional chambers of the 24 participating EU member states as well as the two central chambers in Paris and Munich will be controlled from Luxembourg, where Grabinski will now be serving as a judge for six years.
The seven-person panel, on which Germany is represented by another judge, Patricia Rombach, can appeal directly to the European Court of Justice on questions of compatibility with EU law.
The EU governments agreed to set up the UPC in 2013.
The court is intended to help companies to enforce their patents with effect for several countries in a uniform procedure.
An implementation in Great Britain failed due to Brexit, in Germany the Federal Constitutional Court declared a first law in 2020 to be invalid.
Only then did the required ratification and thus implementation of the UPC take place.