There is a war of spin going on between the patents courts in England and Germany. If both are to be believed, each is doing better than the other in the number of cases being heard, in the time taken to arrive at a judgment and in the quality of the decisions reached.
The English patents court was, until the Woolf reforms in 1999, tarnished with the image of being expensive and slow, despite its well regarded judges’ thorough scrutiny of the facts. Patentees argued that going to Duesseldorf saved both time and money, and IP practitioners in England grumbled that they were losing work to Germany as a result.
