EPO just issued a study regarding requests for Unitary effect filed for granted European patents, since the system of the Unitary Patent entered into force on June 1st, 2023.
According to EPO, a request for Unitary effect was filed for 23,5% of European patents granted in 2024, which corresponds to roughly 26500 requests for Unitary effect received by EPO.
Most of Unitary requests filed were from US or European patent proprietors. It is also interesting to note that close to 60% of requests for Unitary effect were filed by large enterprises.
The last interesting thing to note from this study is the language of the translation chosen by patent proprietors: English seems to be the favoured language when proceedings before EPO were in French or German, while Spanish and German are the favoured languages when proceedings before EPO were in English: Spanish as it allows validation in Spain which is not part of the Unitary patent, and German as most of the litigation before Unified Patent Court seems to occur in Germany.