ZPO becomes more IP-friendly

With effect from April 1, 2025, the legislator has made some changes to the Code of Civil Procedure (ZPO) that may well be relevant for owners of intellectual property. With the new Section 273a ZPO, the secrecy protection regime from the Act on the Protection of Trade Secrets (GeschGehG) has been adopted for all civil court proceedings. This means that a trade secret can also be protected from the opposing party within the procedural framework provided for, even if it is not the subject of a dispute but evidence. If, in the past, you have avoided legitimate legal action because you were reluctant to reveal your cards with regard to the evidence required for this and did not want to disclose your confidential sources to your opponent, possibly for understandable reasons, you can now find better strategies in litigation. Whether the new confidentiality options are good enough depending on the trade secret concerned is of course a question of the individual case, but it is probably worth sounding this out in advance. If the trade secret in question is a trade secret of a technical nature, it should even be possible to obtain advice from a patent attorney in the proceedings with regard to the technical features that are intended to make the evidence a trade secret worthy of protection and to liquidate this as necessary costs of legal action against the losing opponent even if the subject matter of the associated legal dispute is not an IP right at all.