Patent county court costs
The Patents County Court (PCC) is more than just a court for patent disputes. The name of the court doesn’t tell the whole story.
Its role has evolved from the time of its creation in the early 1990s to embrace dispute resolution for all intellectual property causes of action. For small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), it can be the first choice to resolve intellectual property disputes of all types. But concern has developed in respect to the escalating costs involved, even at the PCC.
The publication of the Jackson Report has helped to create a much more cost-conscious environment within English and Welsh Courts. Further reforms have recently been implemented to make the PCC a more attractive forum for SMEs to seek resolution of relevant disputes.
In England and Wales, litigants are confronted with the risk of adverse costs orders in the event that they are not successful in court, either as the respective claimant or defendant. Accordingly, one of the key commercial decisions for claimant companies whose intellectual property rights have been infringed is whether the prospect of recovering the loss caused by infringement of valuable intellectual property rights is affordable or even worth the risk of adverse costs orders in the event of a failure to succeed at trial.
Recent amendments to the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) go some distance to rebalancing the commercial priorities and risks of pursuing cases in the PCC. In particular, since October 2010, litigants in the PCC are guaranteed—subject to limited exceptions—that the maximum recoverable costs are capped at £50,000. The PCC has been endowed with a jurisdictional limit for claims of £500,000.
At first glance, this is an attractive proposition: assuming a rights owner has a good claim for infringement, the maximum risk to the business will be £50,000 in legal costs in the event of defeat. This is not to say that an unsuccessful litigant would be ordered pay £50,000 in adverse costs orders. The assessed recoverable costs, including the irrecoverable costs, have a fixed maximum of £50,000.
The exceptions to the capping rules are where (1) a party behaves unreasonably: in such cases, the costs incurred as a result of the unreasonable conduct of the opposing party may be recovered in addition to the fixed limits; and (2) the proceedings relate to an infringement or revocation of patent or registered design and the validity of the rights has previously been certified by a court.
The maximum costs recoverable at the main stages of the proceedings are:
