LD Mannheim, December 5, 2025, Procedural order re. adjournment of proceedings, UPC_CFI_414/2024

Claimant’s request to reopen the oral hearing and to set a further date for the oral hearing was rejected.

A reopening of the oral hearing and a call for further evidence has to be reserved for exceptional cases (R. 114 RoP). R. 114 RoP is applicable only in situations where, during the oral hearing, a specific issue or a specific in-depth investigation is identified as necessary and cannot reasonably be completed within the existing hearing slot. In such a case, the court may postpone the hearing in order to obtain, for example, further testimony or experimental evidence which has proved necessary as a result of what emerged in the oral hearing.

A different understanding of R. 114 RoP would also contravene Rule 245(2) RoP and Article 81 UPCA which confine rehearing primarily to cases of fundamental procedural defect or to situations involving an act later held to be a criminal offence. These requirements restrict a rehearing to rare, clearly circumscribed situations that affect the integrity of the procedure itself, not to re-litigate or “supplement” the merits.

In the case at hand, Claimant was not able to show that there is a exceptional case according to R. 114 RoP. Rather, Claimant could not justify, why it reached out to its expert of the US proceedings only after the closure of the written procedure, the closure of the interim procedure and the closure of the oral hearing although Defendants disputed Claimant’s various infringement reads with substantiation in their briefs already. Moreover, the fact that the concrete implementation of the attacked embodiments is laid down in source code of the respective software solutions should have been apparent to Claimant during the written procedure already, so that it had all reason to submit respective requests during the preparatory written phase and clarify open points with its expert.