(Publ. 19 MAY 2014) The Justice Department continues its work toward creating a Patents and Market Court for intellectual property law, market law and competition law. The creation of this court will mean that the cases that have previously been handled at the Patent Appeals Court and the Market Court will, in the future, instead be handled in the new Patents and Market Court.

After the end of the consultation phase concerning the draft for the Patents and Market Court (Ds 2014:2) on April 11, 2014, work will now continue with establishing the new proposed Patents and the Market Court. In this new special court cases concerning intellectual property law, market law and competition law will be handled together under one roof, with a first instance in the Stockholm District Court and a second instance in the Svea Court of Appeal. If everything goes according to plan, the court will begin its work in July 2015. Until then, the Justice Department’s work continues to further concretize, clarify and improve the legislative proposals set out in the draft as well as the opinions collected from the various consultation bodies.

The proposal includes, in addition to the fact that the same court will be handling virtually all intellectual property law and marketing law in Sweden, rules on the composition of the court, the ability to merge different types of cases, rules concerning the judges and the technical and financial experts, and more. Various consultation bodies have given their opinions on these rules and it is likely that some of the proposed rules will change, at least to some extent. It is up to the Justice Department to capture the positive and negative comments and feedback given by the consultative bodies, and then process the material and present of a bill at a later date.

The new court is a necessary step toward modernizing and concretizing the procedures when it comes to Groth & Co’s main areas of business. The demand for courts with a high level of competence and a unified precedence makes it clear that there is a need for a reform when it comes to the composition of the court in these cases. The separation of various legal questions into several courts and instances has created a fractured image where the legal proceedings with strong ties to one another have been forced to be held in different forums. The proceedings have been lengthier than what should be reasonable, with subsequent uncertainty when it comes to the questions at hand. These prolonged and fractured proceedings have also had a negative effect on the possibility of rights-holders to efficiently defend and enforce their rights when it comes to the field of intellectual property. To coordinate the different cases within one single court should therefore bring several advantages.

The draft for the Patents and Market Court (Ds 2014:2) is available in Swedish here