UK patent case law: The rules on equivalence

It is a little over a year since the UK Supreme Court’s Actavis v Eli Lilly decision was handed down by Lord Neuberger, in July 2017. Readers will recall that this redefined how the scope of a patent in the UK is determined. For the first time UK law embraced a ‘doctrine of equivalents’, where variants that are not covered by the actual wording of a patent claim can nevertheless be an infringement.