Corning v Hisense Gorenje Germany (CFI, 9 April 2025)

Date	9 April 2025
Court	CFI
Division	Mannheim (DE) Local Division
Type of action	Generic application
Registry reference	App_17158/2025 · ORD_17357/2025
Parties	TCL Operations Polska, Sp. z o.o., TCL Belgium, SA, LG Electronics Deutschland GmbH, LG Electronics European Shared Service Center B.V., LG…

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 procedural order of 9 April 2025 (UPC_CFI_819/2024, App_17158/2025), Presiding Judge Tochtermann, acting as judge-rapporteur of the Mannheim Local Division, rejected the requests by the TCL, Hisense and LG defendants to split into three Corning’s infringement action on EP 3 296 274, and ordered them to file a single statement of defence. The order places on the common representative, not on the Court, the handling of sensitive information between competing clients.

Question

Should proceedings be separated where competing defendants represented by the same counsel say they must disclose sensitive supply-chain information and point to EU competition law concerns?

Decision

The difficulty arises solely from the choice of a common representative: it is for that representative to organise the case, for instance through a mutual confidentiality agreement, and separation is not required. Information exchanged may be used only for the proceedings. The Court does not have to guarantee any particular arrangement. The Rules of Procedure do not provide for splitting a statement of defence into several briefs. The representative may send each group a version showing only the passages relevant to it. Rule 262A does not resolve the conflicts of a representative acting for several defendants.

Key points for practice

Competing defendants that choose common counsel file a single defence and must organise confidentiality among themselves.
Rule 262A is not the tool for resolving conflicts between clients of the same representative.

Provisions applied

Rules of Procedure: Rule 262A
Case law cited: No UPC decision is cited, apart from an order of 2 April 2025 in the same proceedings.

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.

Follow this case

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

claimantTCL Belgium, SA2 decisions in the corpus Follow this party
claimantTCL Operations Polska, Sp. z o.onormalised name: TCL Operations Polska Sp. z.o.o8 decisions in the corpus Follow this party
claimantLG Electronics Deutschland GmbHFollow this party
claimantLG Electronics European Shared Service Center B.V.Follow this party
claimantLGFollow 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): Les demandes de disjonction des défenderesses TCL, Hisense et LG sont rejetées et un mémoire en défense unique doit être déposé.
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 3 296 274 B1 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 3 296 274 B1` Fining of boroalumino silicate glasses recorded proprietor: Corning Inc	Mentioned in the analysis (role not qualified) Also mentioned in 12 other decision(s): TCL EUROPE v Corning (CFI, 24 February 2026) · Corning v TCL Deutschland (CFI, UPC_CFI_819/2024, 16 April 2026) · Corning v Hisense Gorenje Germany (CFI, 18 February 2026) · TCL EUROPE v Corning (CFI, 1 December 2025) · Corning v Hisense Gorenje Germany (CFI, 3 October 2025) · TCL Europe v Corning (CFI, 8 September 2025) · Corning v Hisense Gorenje Germany (CFI, 2 July 2025) · TCL Europe v Corning (CFI, 13 June 2025)	not recorded	not recorded	not recorded	Espacenet · European Patent Register existence and title of the publication checked on 30 October 2026 (Google Patents, Espacenet and Register links are not checked automatically) 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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