ADD THE AFTER MEETING BOAT EVENT TO YOUR REGISTRATION!

"How the European Unified Patent Court (UPC) is Reshaping the Global Litigation Landscape by Driving Settlements"

The Unified Patent Court (UPC) is reshaping patent litigation in Europe, especially in cases involving infringement across both Europe and the United States. By the time of the LES 2026 Annual Meeting in San Diego, the UPC will have just passed its third anniversary. Importantly, the UPC Court of Appeal will have issued a substantial number of decisions, offering greater clarity on the court’s approach—widely seen as favourable to patent holders.

Key discussion points include:

• Summaries of key UPC decisions, along with statistics and emerging litigation trends.
• Comparison of UPC and US district court litigation, focusing on differences in speed, cost, and available remedies.
• Patent prosecution strategies to strengthen portfolios for UPC enforcement.
• Guidance for licensing and co-ownership agreements under the UPC system.
• This session is designed to provide practical, strategic insights for navigating the evolving landscape of transatlantic patent litigation and portfolio management...

"Verdict to Value: Apportionment, Appellate Risk, and Financial Modeling in Patent Monetization"

The patent monetization landscape is undergoing a structural shift. The collapse of inter partes review as a reliable invalidation vehicle has driven a tactical pivot toward ex parte reexamination, while heightened Daubert scrutiny is forcing litigants to meet increasingly granular standards of proof on damages. Firms are securing significant trial wins, yet appellate vulnerability threatens to unwind those outcomes, sometimes catastrophically. Recently, a failure in apportionment allowed the Federal Circuit to reduce a jury verdict to nominal damages, sending a signal to patent holders, litigation counsel, and the private capital markets that fund these cases.

This workshop brings together perspectives from IP counsel, litigation finance, and financial modelling to examine the critical gap between winning a verdict and monetizing its value through appeal. As demand increases for what funders are calling “”appellate monetization,”” (the underwriting of post-trial legal assets) the ability to construct damages models that withstand scrutiny has become increasingly important in the entire monetization chain...

"Evolving Best Practices for Licensing and Monetization of Biomedical Data in the Age of AI"

We will explore the adaptation of classical licensing practices to the many novel issues and challenges presented by the licensing of human data, especially biomedical data. Data is an emerging asset class that does not fit neatly into traditional categories of intellectual property, yet data sets have become increasingly attractive assets for monetization. Hence, the need to address challenges of data licensing is becoming ever more acute. Human biomedical data presents unique complexities for the prospects of licensing, including data governance, data privacy, the rights of data subjects, and rapidly evolving complexities in national and international laws addressing data accessibility, use and cybersecurity. Concerns are especially acute in situations where biomedical data is used to develop or train an artificial intelligence (AI) model, or where such data is ingested by an AI and used to generate results germane to human clinical research, diagnosis, treatment or prognosis.

We will explore how these issues map onto and challenge existing license agreement frameworks, raising the need for new and expanded definitions and creative grants of licenses, restrictions on use, the impact of data-specific risks on representations and warranties, liabilities and indemnities. One of the most pressing questions is valuation and structure of financial terms, given the sparsity of publicly available data licenses to provide examples...

Thank you to our current sponsors:

If you have any questions, please contact the LES Annual Meeting Office