Proposals to replace the Patents County Court
Lord Justice Jackson, of the Court of Appeal, has reviewed the costs incurred in civil
litigation in England and Wales. He has arrived at some specific recommendations for
intellectual property actions, aimed in particular at reducing the cost of access to justice
for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). At present, there are two main fora in
England and Wales in which patent disputes can be litigated: the Patents Court, which is
part of the High Court, and the Patents County Court (PCC), both of which are based in
London. The PCC was created in 1988 in order to generate a lower cost alternative to
High Court proceedings, but the unification of court procedure brought in by the Wolff
reforms has meant there is little practical difference between the two courts, especially as
far as litigation costs are concerned.
As such, Lord Jackson has recognised that companies, and SMEs in particular, would appreciate a lower-cost route to resolving their disputes. Therefore he has proposed replacing the current PCC with a new Intellectual Property County Court (IPCC), in which parties would be obliged to set out their cases in much more detail early on in the proceedings, more of the procedure would be carried out on paper, and the length of oral hearings would be substantially reduced. Cross-examination would be eliminated, unless a party can convince the judge that the benefit of doing so exceeds the costs involved.
The costs recoverable by the winning party in the IPCC would be restricted to £50,000 for patent infringement and validity cases and £25,000 for other cases such as trade mark or copyright disputes. There would be also be a limit of £250,000 on the damages recoverable from an infringer, in line with the IPCC’s role as a lower-cost forum.
There are also proposals for an IP small claims track to be brought in within the IPCC, for very small claims (worth less than £5,000), with practically no costs recoverable.
Whether the reforms will be implemented remains to be seen, but Lord Jackson’s review made it clear that it has been appreciated that smaller companies feel the need to be able to resolve disputes in the courts at lower cost than at present, and with greater predictability of the costs for which they could be liable should they lose.
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