Peter Meier-Beck is a retired Presiding Judge of the Bundesgerichtshof and has been working as an arbitrator, mediator and independent advisor in patent disputes since the end of his term of office.
He was born in Düsseldorf in 1955 and studied law at the universities of Bonn and Freiburg im Breisgau. He passed his first state examination in Freiburg in 1980 and received his doctorate in law in 1982. After passing his second state examination, he worked briefly as a lawyer in Düsseldorf in 1984 before joining the judiciary of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia at the end of the year.
As a judge, Peter Meier-Beck was a member of the 4th Civil Chamber of the Düsseldorf Landgericht (Regional Court) until 1991, which heard most of the most important national and international patent disputes and was initially presided over by Rüdiger Rogge and, after his election as a federal judge, by Gisbert Steinacker.
From 1991 to 1993, Peter Meier-Beck served as a judge at the Düsseldorf Oberlandesgericht (Higher Regional Court), where he was a member of the 19th Civil Chamber and headed an administrative department that dealt primarily with recourse claims and supervisory control, as well as the tasks of the Central Authority of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia under The Hague Convention on the Service Abroad of Judicial and Extrajudicial Documents in Civil or Commercial Matters.
In 1993, Peter Meier-Beck returned to the Düsseldorf Landgericht, where he took over as presiding judge of the 4th Civil Chamber, which dealt predominantly with patent infringement cases, but also with disputes relating to trademarks, licence agreements, employee inventions and plant variety protection.
In 2000, Peter Meier-Beck was elected federal judge and joined the 10th Civil Division of the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice). In addition, he was assigned to the Competition Law Division of the court in 2002.
As is still the case, appeals in patent revocation cases formed the focus of the work of the 10th Civil Division at that time. The division’s other areas of law included patent infringement and patent licensing cases, plant variety protection law, public procurement law, and disputes arising from contracts for work, travel, and passenger transport.
In 2010, Peter Meier-Beck was appointed Presiding Judge and took over as Chairman of the 10th Civil Division, having already headed the 10 bis Civil Division, which had been temporarily established in 2009 to relieve the 10th Civil Division. In September 2019, he left the 10th Civil Division and took over as chairman of the Competition Law Division, which had previously been headed by the President of the Bundesgerichtshof, and the newly established 13th Civil Division. Upon reaching the statutory retirement age, he left office at the end of September 2021.
Peter Meier-Beck has been teaching intellectual property law, in particular patent law, since 1995. At Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, which appointed him honorary professor in 2005, he is co-director of the Centre for Intellectual Property Law. The Faculty of Laws at University College London appointed Peter Meier-Beck an honorary professor in 2022.
Since 1 July 2024, Peter Meier-Beck has been an international judge of the Singapore International Commercial Court (SICC).