How much? Full-time UPC judges will earn €132,000 - €144,000 net a year

Merpel contemplating her next career move...
Following last week's Preparatory Committee meeting where the topics of opt-out and court fees were agreed (see post here), comes news that the judicial salaries for full-time Unified Patent Court judges have been announced.

For a judge in the Court of First Instance you are looking at €11,000 net per month.  This amounts to €132,000 per year in your bank account.  For judges in the Court of Appeal, you get an extra €1,000 net a month, bringing your annual income to €144,000.

With the judicial pension package and allowances still to be finalized, it is hoped (whether realistically or not) that this will be enough to attract Europe's experienced patent judges who users will depend upon to ensure that the UPC's decisions, especially in its early days, are of high quality.

Other UPC news includes:

  • The publication of the Rules of Mediation which were agreed in December 2015.  
  • The approval of the UPC statutory instrument in the UK House of Commons and House of Lords on Tuesday and Wednesday this week.  This will be subject to an in-depth analysis by fellow Kat, Darren, later on.  
  • Practical details as to how to opt-out using the Case Management System can be found here.
  • The first budget of the UPC will be the topic of discussion at next week's Finance working group meeting in Paris
The AmeriKat will be back later with a special guest post from a UPC insider.  

How much? Full-time UPC judges will earn €132,000 - €144,000 net a year How much?  Full-time UPC judges will earn €132,000 - €144,000 net a year Reviewed by Annsley Merelle Ward on Thursday, March 03, 2016 Rating: 5

5 comments:

  1. I believe that EU officials earn tax free salaries, unlike practitioners in private practice. This massively distorts the comparison.

    ReplyDelete
  2. If these rates are after tax, then (taking a tax rate of 40% across the board and a current €/£ exchange rate) the pre-tax salary will be pretty close to the £177k which UK High Court judges are paid. So this agreement on judicial salaries removes a feared obstacle to the UK Patent Judges getting involved in the UPC.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The whole article is about net salary !

    ReplyDelete
  4. But such salaries are clearly insufficient to attract applicants from the EPO, even taking into account the harshness of the working conditions.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anon 1056,
    Were DG3 members not banned from applying? I only ask because at the time it seemed surprising given that the EPO seemed to be trying to reduce DG3 numbers and that seemed counter-intuitive to block any from leaving.

    ReplyDelete

All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.

It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.

Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html

Powered by Blogger.