Edwards Lifescience Corporation v. Meril GmbH and others, UPC CFI, LD Munich, 11 August 2026, Case no. UPC_CFI_1160/2026
This application followed a finding by the LD Munich that the Meril defendants had infringed Edwards’ EP 3 669 828 B2 and were liable to compensate Edwards for the damage that Edwards had suffered and would suffer as a result of the infringements. Edwards filed an application for the determination of damages, including a request that the defendants be ordered to lay open their books and provide further information relating to a wide variety of matters, including inter alia reports and policies relating to discounts and rebates, costs of manufacturing and of raw materials, inter-company financial data and flows, all executed and draft licence agreements. Meril filed a defence to the application challenging many of these requests and further requested that certain information and documents be treated as confidential. An interim conference was held on 11 August 2026.
The value of the dispute was also disputed. On that issue, the JR (Dr Matthias Zigann) held that the value was to be determined by the underlying claim for damages. Edwards was currently estimating that claim to be €15 million and this was accordingly taken as the value of the dispute.
On the requests to open books and provide documents and information, the JR held that the case would have to go to the Court of Appeal, unless the parties came to an agreement or the case was referred to the PMAC. This was the first time that the UPC was required to define the details of a claim for damages and accompanying claims to open books. It had also not been determined whether national or UPC law applied. The JR’s preliminary assessment was that profits from non-infringing products could be taken into account when calculating damages in some circumstances and such products could therefore also be the subject of an application to open the books. The JR also decided that an arrangement for the protection of confidential information that was subject to the open-the-books order must also be made. The parties’ representatives agreed to work on a proposal for this.
Some purely procedural directions were also made by the JR.
A copy of the decision can be found here.
