The Unified Patent Court has announced that starting 29 May 2023 external users will be able to practice entry into force (EIF) functionalities on a dedicated CMS platform.
The environment will be the same as the current sunrise practice CERUS, on which the EIF functionalities will be activated. There is no end date for the practice period.
According to a report on the UPC website: ‘The Court will only ensure a passive practice. Interactions with external users and the Court as foreseen in the CMS will be limited. It means that the progression of the workflows and the procedures is not guaranteed. The UPC staff is currently working on EIF preparation and Sunrise running activities and cannot be dedicated for the EIF practice tasks. Therefore, we kindly request users to limit their requests, to which the Court will respond on best effort basis.
In addition to the EIF scope during the external practice, all Sunrise functionalities will remain available, including APIs requests.
Please note that:
- The strong authentication is activated in the CMS test environment (CERUS). Users will need to use this functionality to create accounts and login to the CMS connect.
- Users already registered in CERUS will not need to create a new user account to test the CMS EIF functionalities as of 29th of May.
- Users should not provide real data or real documents when testing CMS functionalities for EIF.
- The CMS test environment will not be refreshed, the database will contain some test data in relation with the Sunrise functionalities.
- The check of documents type uploaded will be activated. Only documents of type PDF/A will be accepted.
- The check of uploaded documents signature will be activated. Only digitally signed documents will be accepted.’
Recently, as was noticed in a tweet by Pacta sunt servanda, the court has created decision templates for several actions and placed them online.
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Instead of working on making “entry into force” functionalities available, how about the UPC’s IT team spending more time on ensuring that the CMS actually works at all. Since yesterday, it seems to have fallen over completely.
Has anyone seen the CMS forms to be used for filing a Statement of claims already? Or will those forms become available with the EIF functionality?
The CMS is an absolute disaster. The capacity of the system obviously is by far not large enough .
I was able to file one opt-out request today, after trying many times last Thursday and last Friday. At present, the CMS does not seem to work at all….
Does anyone know the bank account to which court fess have to be sent? I need to file a protective writ on June 1, 2023.