The Preparatory Committee of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) has published yesterday on its website Summing up and Looking Forward to 2018 by its Chair, Alexander Ramsay. After noting that the case pending in the German Federal Constitutional Court meant a delay to the timeline which the Committee thought likely at the start of 2017, and difficulty in predicting a new timeline, Mr Ramsay said the Committee were using the additional time to prepare the functionality of the Court, although some work could only be concluded in the project’s final phase: the ‘Provisional Application’.  Mr Ramsay then highlighted the importance of this phase and what it means.  In summary, he explained that under the UPC Agreement’s Protocol on Provisional Application (PPA) the institutional, organisational and financial parts of the Agreement apply provisionally before the Agreement enters into force, and therefore when the PPA enters into force, the organisation will be created and acquire legal personality, and it will, for example, be able to conclude agreements with third parties and formalise the preparatory work already done, including, crucially, the completion of the recruitment of the judges;  the Committee’s assessment is that the Provisional Application phase needs to be six to eight months.