KeyMed (Medical & Industrial Equipment) v PR Medical (CFI, 6 March 2026)

Date	6 March 2026
Court	CFI
Division	Milan (IT) Local Division
Type of action	Infringement Action
Case number(s)	UPC_CFI_141/2026
Registry reference	UPC_CFI_141/2026
Parties	KeyMed (Medical & Industrial Equipment) Limited v. PR Medical s.r.l

Official decision (PDF) · UPC registry entry

Dhenne Avocats represents claimants and defendants in European patent disputes before the Unified Patent Court, including the Paris divisions.

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Dhenne Avocats · 10 October 2026

Our analysis

Summary

By an order of 6 March 2026 (UPC_CFI_141/2026), the judge-rapporteur of the Milan Local Division dismissed PR Medical’s preliminary objection seeking to have KeyMed’s infringement action (EP 2 575 590, ‘Detecto.’ accessory for diagnostic devices) conducted in Italian rather than English. The exception in Rule 14.2(b) RoP requires two cumulative conditions, to be construed strictly, and the second was not met. The order confirms that a defendant based in Italy cannot insist on Italian where the action could have been brought before another local division.

Question

May a defendant whose principal place of business is in Italy require, under Rule 14.2(b) RoP, that the proceedings be conducted in Italian?

Decision

Rule 14.2(b) RoP requires both that the defendant has its principal place of business in the Member State concerned and that the action cannot be brought before another local division under Art. 33(1)(a) UPCA. PR Medical is based in Italy, but KeyMed alleges infringing acts in Germany, offers through a website accessible in all Member States and offers at congresses in Spain and Germany: the action could have been brought before another division, in particular a German one. The choice of English does not impair the rights of the defence, since PR Medical’s website and product brochure are in English. Costs are left to the main proceedings.

Key points for practice

The language exception in Rule 14.2(b) RoP is construed strictly and fails as soon as another local division would have had jurisdiction.
Practical point: the defendant’s own use of English in its commercial material weakens any objection based on the rights of the defence.

Provisions applied

Agreement on a Unified Patent Court: Art. 33(1)(a), 49(1) and (2) and 73(2)(a)
Rules of Procedure: Rules 14.2(b) and 220.2

Prepared by Dhenne Avocats from the official decision, consulted on 10 October 2026. The database is updated every week, on Friday. Only the official text is authoritative.

Going further

Lexicon: Patent infringement action.

Publications by Matthieu Dhenne: Pleading the Long Arm: What a UPC Statement of Claim Must Carry Beyond Jurisdiction (Kluwer Patent Blog).

Source and translations

Official source: Unified Patent Court registry link recorded in the record
Original language: not recorded
Translation available: no translation recorded the firm’s French record is a summary, not a translation
Date checked: not recorded

Only the official text is authoritative. A machine translation is never presented as official, republishing a third-party document requires a verified basis in rights, and a link to the source is preferred.

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Proceedings, related decisions, appeals, parties and patents as recorded in the registry and in the Dhenne Avocats corpus. Each link states its source.

Proceedings

UPC_CFI_141/2026 official number

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Parties

claimantKeyMed (Medical & Industrial Equipment) LimitedFollow this party
defendantPR Medical s.r.lFollow this party

Exact name as it appears in the record, group affiliation only where sourced and dated.

Decisions in the same proceedings and documented appeals

No other decision in the corpus bears the same case number, and no appeal is documented in the corpus to date.

What the record states

Nature of the act: Infringement Action
Outcome (Dhenne Avocats summary): L'exception préliminaire de PR Medical tendant à la conduite de la procédure en italien est rejetée, l'action pouvant être portée devant une autre division locale. Les frais sont renvoyés au fond.
Appeal: No appeal documented in the corpus, this does not mean that no appeal was lodged.
Instance: First-instance decision, whether it has become final is not recorded.

Patents mentioned

EP 2 575 590 mentioned in: Dhenne Avocats analysis Follow this patent

Scope: Dhenne Avocats corpus. Registry-based links are marked “official number”; links derived from the analyses are marked as such. An erroneous link can be withdrawn without deleting any record.

Patents and standards

Publication	Role in the dispute	Family	Standard and declaration	Pool	Sources
`EP 2 575 590`	Mentioned in the analysis (role not qualified)	not recorded	not recorded	not recorded	Espacenet links not checked mentioned in: Dhenne Avocats analysis

The statuses “asserted in litigation”, “declared essential”, “listed by a pool” and “essentiality examined by a court” are distinct and may coexist. Validity, infringement and technical essentiality are different questions. Scope: patents cited in the decisions of the Dhenne Avocats corpus, with no essentiality score or prediction.

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