Trust-building Mechanisms in New Judicial Actors – A Case Study of the Unified Patent Court

In various sectors calls are made for the creation of specialized courts (e.g. environmental law, business law, intellectual property law). In some countries and regions this is indeed leading to the creation of new courts and tribunals. For instance, starting from 1 June 2023, the Unified Patent Court (UPC) will start its operations in Europe. The UPC is a specialized international court common to (currently) 17 EU Member States with local and regional dvisions, a central division and a court of appeal. It comprises legally qualified judges and technically qualified judges from all participating EU Member States. At many occasions it has been noted that the success of the court will largely depend on “public trust” or more specifically the “trust of the patent user community” in the UPC and its judges (Petersen & Schovsbo 2018; van Zimmeren 2015; Hilty et al 2013). In this respect, in particular the exceptional institutional design of the UPC, but also the profile (i.e. education, experience, skills) of the UPC judges and their performance are considered very important. This paper is part of a larger project related to trust and the UPC. The current paper does not focus on the trust dynamics, but on potential trust-building mechanisms. Bachman et al. (2015) developed a conceptual model with six key mechanisms (sense-making, relational, regulation and controls, ethical culture, transparency and transference) for restoring trust in organizations and institutions. This model has been primarily developed in view of private organizations. The six mechanisms are as such not suitable for the judicial context. The objective of this paper is to reconceptualize these trust-building mechanisms and propose a new model tailored to the judicial context offering a variety of potential trust-building mechanisms. The paper draws on the theoretical and empirical literature on the institutional design of courts.