Qufora v Manfred Sauer (CFI, 6 August 2024)

Date	6 August 2024
Court	CFI
Division	Munich (DE) Local Division
Type of action	Generic application
Registry reference	App_33560/2024 · ORD_40041/2024
Parties	Manfred Sauer GmbH

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 order of 6 August 2024 (UPC_CFI_67/2024, ACT_8805/2024, CC_28486/2024, ORD_40041/2024), the judge-rapporteur of the Munich Local Division (U. Voß) dismissed the request by Manfred Sauer GmbH and Mr Manfred Sauer, defendants in Qufora’s infringement action on EP 2 911 727, to be excused from translating into English, the language of the proceedings, exhibits in German drawn mainly from the EPO opposition proceedings. The order marks the limits of dispensing with translation before a German local division.

Question

May a panel dispense a party from translating German exhibits into the language of the proceedings where the representatives and most of the judges speak German?

Decision

Translation follows from the language regime of the proceedings, and the waiver under Art. 51(1) UPCA is available only where appropriate, after weighing the parties’ interests and proportionality. It is not appropriate here: one of the legally qualified judges does not read German, and the volume, nature and likely relevance of the exhibits call for translation. German’s status as an EPO official language and the rules governing German national courts make no difference. Hearing the respondent before ruling on the request was proper (Art. 56(2) UPCA, Rule 264 RoP). As the applicants filed machine translations in the alternative, Rule 7.1 RoP is complied with and no further order is needed.

Key points for practice

Practical point: in proceedings conducted in English, German exhibits must be translated even before a German local division, machine translations filed in the alternative were enough here to comply with Rule 7.1 RoP.

Provisions applied

Agreement on a Unified Patent Court: Preamble, recitals 5 and 6, and Arts. 42, 49, 51(1) and 56(2)
Rules of Procedure: Rules 7.1 and 264

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: Written procedure (UPC), Court fees and costs (UPC).

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

No case number recorded in this record.

Parties

claimantManfred Sauer GmbHFollow 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: Generic application
Outcome (Dhenne Avocats summary): La demande de dispense de traduction des pièces en allemand est rejetée. Les traductions automatiques déposées à titre subsidiaire satisfont la règle 7.1.
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 2 911 727 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 2 911 727`	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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