The two windowless courtrooms in which patent cases are heard in the Rhineland city of Mannheim may lack grandeur, but their decisions are thundering around the world.
Tucked away on the ground floor of the concrete-gray Mannheim District Court, the courtrooms are a major front in the global disputes over patents underlying smartphones and other popular digital devices. “If you ask people in Silicon Valley, they all know Mannheim and compare it to the Eastern District of Texas,” says Marcus Grosch, a Mannheim-based patent litigator with Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan who has represented Google’s Motorola Mobility Division in the city’s patent courts. Lightning-quick resolution of patent infringement cases, of course, is the storied reputation of the Texas court. Patent litigators favor Mannheim because they say its courts are the swiftest in Europe for handling petitions for permanent injunctions. In recent years, companies suing in Mannheim court include, in addition to Motorola, such high-tech giants as Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co., and Microsoft Corporation.
