In the United Kingdom the Patents County Court is enjoying a renaissance under the control of its new judge His Honour Judge Colin Birss QC. Despite the reference to patents in its name, the Patents County Court can deal with all Intellectual Property matters.

The revived Patents County Court has been receiving cases since the end of the summer in 2010, and new practice rules came into effect on 1st October 2010. To date HHJ Birss has showed himself more than willing to control all aspects of the intellectual property cases which come to the court to be heard.

In a case about trade marks, passing off and copyright infringement brought by Dame Vivienne Westwood OBE against Mr. Knight, Westwood v Knight, [2010] EWPCC 016, the judge explained how he would apply the new provisions:

"Part of the point of the new CMC procedure in the Patents County Court is that the court will pre-read into the case as a whole in order to conduct the CMC. A highly abbreviated skeleton argument on specific issues may well be necessary but there should be no need for extensive duplicative skeletons."

In considering what further evidence was to be filed, Birss HHJ commented:

"The parties do not have a free rein to call any evidence they want on any topic. The court will control the procedure. Further material will only be permitted on identified points and only if it satisfies the cost benefit test in paragraph 29.2(2). If material has not been permitted in this way, CPR Pt 63.23(2) sets a significant hurdle in the way of its introduction into the case. It seems to me that one important consequence of the provisions is that, subject to proper safeguards, some relevant evidence will be excluded from trials. Merely because some evidence is relevant will not necessarily justify permission being given to adduce it. On the other hand the parties need to know that the court will give permission for evidence to be filed in a proper case since otherwise there will be a temptation to overload the statements of case with unnecessary material."

The judge then dealt with various areas on which evidence might be submitted and used a cost benefit analysis to decide for each issue if evidence should be filed. For example, as the reputation of the claimant was known, even though such evidence would not be too costly to produce, it was unnecessary. However, the judge did give permission for the claimant to file evidence as to the dates and extents of use of various brands even though there had been no attempt to estimate how much this evidence would cost.

The judge not only fixed the trial date (8th March 2011), but, unusually also gave himself a time limit for preparing his judgement.

"I have also set the date on which judgment will be handed down, two weeks later on Tuesday 22nd March 2011. Two weeks after the trial will be sufficient time to prepare the judgment in a case of this kind. In my judgment it is in the interests of the parties and of the court to have these dates set now as it allows everyone to prepare properly and to manage their workload."

In Media C.A.T. Limited v Allan Billington, [2010] EWPCC 018 HHJ Birss took an even more proactive approach. As he explained:

".....my clerk and I conducted a review in October/November of all the pending and newly issued cases in the Patents County Court files. Emerging from this review was the presence of 13 more or less identical cases commenced by Media C.A.T Limited in September /October 2010. All are of the same general form"

"In November 2010 a further 14 similar Media C.A.T. Limited cases have been issued. This case is one of them."

From a letter written to the court in the particular case, Judge Birss assumed that the claim forms may have been served without a response pack. Therefore, he made an order, without hearing the parties, convening a hearing for directions and set the date for 17th January 2011.

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