Le Lab du contentieux des brevets
Collect decisions, illuminate debates, advance legal practice.
Le Lab explores patent law from an international perspective. It collects and analyses decisions, compares approaches across legal systems and traces their underlying legal texts. Its case-law databases, commentaries, statistics and research tools help lawyers, engineers, researchers and inventors understand debates and develop their practice.
Innovation at the heart of our practice
Innovation shapes both the projects we defend and the way we practise. We seek to contribute to the development of patent law and legal practice: questioning solutions, testing arguments and building analytical tools informed by international case law and our litigation experience.
Le Lab extends that approach. It pools resources for in-house teams, counsel, researchers, inventors and anyone navigating a patent dispute. It is intended as a space for research and shared knowledge, growing with new decisions and the questions they raise.
Choose your starting point
A business may need a practical explanation; a practitioner may be looking for a precise authority. Start with a legal concept, a decision or a technology, then follow the links to analyses and original materials.
Understand a legal issue
What do inventive step and sufficiency of disclosure mean? Our glossary provides reference points for reading patents and decisions.
Find a decision
Combine legal issue, origin, court, technical field, date and procedural stage. Each record separates context, holding and scope.
Start with your technology
Chemistry, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, biotechnology, mechanical engineering, electronics or telecommunications: identify the issues, then explore relevant decisions.
Origin — The origins of patent law
Explore European instruments and their preparatory materials, from the Strasbourg Convention to the EPC and UPC. Search a reference or topic and open the original source.
Read further and return to the sources
Our articles and publications examine issues arising in practice. Case records link to official decisions, applicable provisions and related resources. Our litigation services and practice areas place those analyses within the course of a dispute.
The explorer brings together an initial selection from the UPC, the EPO Technical Boards and Enlarged Board of Appeal, and national courts. It preserves differences between legal frameworks and identifies established links between decisions in the same proceedings.
Follow the specialist databases
UPC Litigation Watch
Follow Unified Patent Court decisions and explore the substantive and procedural issues they address.
FRAND Litigation Watch
Put case law on standard-essential patents and FRAND licensing into perspective.
Pharma Litigation Watch
Find decisions that shed light on patent disputes in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors.
Read case commentaries
Our commentaries examine decisions in their legal context, discuss their reasoning and consider the questions they raise for practitioners. They are a separate resource from the decision databases.
See the wider picture through statistics
Aggregate data offer another perspective on judicial activity. Our UPC statistics complement the study of individual decisions; they do not predict the outcome of a case.
Observe, discuss, share
Le Lab combines empirical work — collecting decisions, comparing practice and examining data — with reflection on legal rules. Law involves choices: which solutions serve the public interest and encourage innovation? Our analyses put forward arguments and opinions that are open to discussion.
Like an open laboratory, the resources develop through shared sources, debate and readers’ corrections. Dates, methods and context matter: a metric needs its limitations, and a commentary the complete decision.
These resources provide general information. They do not replace a review of the facts or advice tailored to a particular matter.
Contribute to Le Lab
Have you found a significant decision from anywhere in the world, an interesting comparison, or a correction? Lawyers, engineers, researchers and inventors are welcome to help develop Le Lab.
To suggest a decision, include the country, court, date, reference and, where possible, a link to the official source. A few lines on its significance are enough to start. Please share public documents; confidential case materials are not intended for Le Lab.
You can also propose an article or respond to a commentary. Contributions are reviewed before publication, with attribution when the contributor wishes. Feedback may lead to an analysis being expanded or a record corrected.
Patent litigation news and events
UPC · Resources
Decisions, legal instruments, analyses, statistics and tools: the firm’s resources on the Unified Patent Court.
Litigation news
A dated selection of institutional developments and analyses from respected publications.
Events
Conferences, meetings and training to follow developments in patent litigation.
Follow Le Lab
Subscribe to our updates or read the latest analysis from the European patent litigation blog.
UPC case commentaries
The context, reasoning and significance of decisions from the Unified Patent Court.
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FRAND case commentaries
Analyses of decisions concerning standard-essential patents and FRAND licensing.
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Pharma case commentaries
Perspectives on decisions concerning pharmaceutical patents and biotechnology.
Read commentaries →