1. Key takeaways

Admissibility of auxiliary requests

Claimant requested to limit the submission of auxiliary requests for the further course of proceedings.

The court does not see a legal basis for pre-emptively and categorially ruling out the submission of any further auxiliary requests. Nor does the Court see any legal basis to order the Defendant to make the auxiliary requests (more) convergent.

An announcement reserving the right to amend, e.g. combine, these auxiliary requests, as required, and/or to change the order of the auxiliary requests in the further course of the proceedings is not considered as an auxiliary request on file because it lacks a concrete proposal.

Last-minute requests and submissions are in contrats to the character of the front-loaded UPC proceedings.

Admittance of (prior art) documents to the proceedings / late-filing

A prior art document (D 46) filed by the Claimant with the Reply to the Defence to Revocation was objected by the Defendant as being late-filed. The Court D 46 into the proceedings and gave the Defendant a further deadline of six weeks to comment in writing on D 46 limiting the submission to a maximum of 10 pages and to a respopnse to the invalidity arguemnts raised by Claimant based on D 46.

2. Division

Central Division (Section Munich)

3. UPC number

UPC_CFI_252/2023

4. Type of proceedings

Revocation action

5. Parties

Claimant: NanoString Technologies Europe Limited (Bristol, GB)

Defendant: President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA, US)

6. Patent(s)

EP 2794928

7. Body of legislation / Rules

R. 28 RoP, R. 35 RoP, R. 58 RoP, R. 263 RoP

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