At Monday night's Competition Law Association meeting on "Recent European Trade Mark Cases", hosted at Slaughter and May, IPKat's co-master Jeremy Phillips was outlining the increased length of time taken to resolve IP references to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and appeals both to the ECJ and the Court of First Instance.
On this issue, Justin Watts, an intellectual property partner with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, adds this:
When the ECJ quotes the length of its lists, I assume that means how long it has taken from referral for the cases currently before the court. That is not really a useful figure on which to base advice. Clients want to know how long a case referred now will take to reach judgment.
If the rate at which cases are referred exceeds the rate at which they are heard, then the waiting time for cases currently before the court must be an underestimate because the waiting list has grown between the current case starting and being heard.
Assuming a simple model in which the rate at which cases is heard is a constant (n), and the rate at which they are referred is also constant (N), then the current waiting time for cases in court now will underestimate the actual waiting time for new cases by a factor of N/n. Based on the figures given last night, with 446 new cases but only 331 cases heard per year, new cases will have to wait 35% longer than current waiting times. That means 34.5, not 25.5, months.
This is more or less consistent with the number calculated starting from the number of outstanding cases - 999 - against the number heard per year - 331. At that rate, a case added to the list now will take (999/331) years, or 36.2 months, to work its way through.
In other words, the position is already much worse than it looks. Add on to that all the reasons you gave for why, in fact, the rate at which cases are added is in fact growing, and it becomes even more worrying.
Lengthy litigation here, here and here
Swift justice here, here and here
DELAYS IN EUROPEAN IP LITIGATION: IT CAN ONLY GET WORSE
![DELAYS IN EUROPEAN IP LITIGATION: IT CAN ONLY GET WORSE]()
Reviewed by Jeremy
on
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Rating:
Follow the IPKat on LinkedIn 
![[Guest post] Thou shalt not discriminate the Lego block over any other kind of product – GRUR speaks out on C-211/24](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWJYQUJNvYydrZcjwSHPuxd14xX3_48aBusHKBogY-Wg1BPSJSABbFFjmGiUV3aqG2npP9xYaIl1vtWK5AsqGOQPgRD2TWFLhyyc4xGm1fHDD-tt9kHcrSSgAyju2P9wSKz0VW6h7D5MD4Hxd9vREyxKYzlMRNXxxtxc3DiNsXppfVaxgSxAMV/s72-c/21742619125_7c9e53cd39_o.png)
![[Guest post] Comparison of wine and gin: the EUIPO’s unquestionable Similarity Tool](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNfTEBXiPVS0XjZi4mNE1OtXLxXiEp1PUgcUK7MMMXlfyTkO5SMXv-VCMXXNdS_F1XdMMxYca1VbBTGvvDeTVpo5x-5YwR7atQJmK3x32T8LACpf4308kht3nEtaxPwEPcGGrB0s5xjGktmQPOiVwPVLRO5JbW19qupc7xUtiVutvaWHow0OpBkA/s72-c/Picture%201.jpg)
![[Guest post] Muddying the waters of copyright – a rapid reaction to today’s IPEC decision which sees the sinking of the WaterRower’s claims for copyright protection](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7chFANC7ppmZl4_nlR6_hZEcg6cOhVEJNVXqki4p82BoVlcLFotuOXzHWYD5lKLiiK_kRoWeXmJjjaV2DpoKsAWq8U3LFioO5W_841a9gcfDIFjvZWcGqfnr0jWJNtyXptIYR_8bxCssaDkJ9KMokuSqy1g65Il7p2hPwo4MfRCEGoUPQJesvbg/s72-w400-c-h189/Screenshot%202024-11-11%20at%2018.20.45.png)
Posts
No comments:
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