Remember how our former lord chancellor, Chris Grayling, used to sound off about EU justice encroaching on British sovereignty? At the very time he was putting his foot down on schemes such as the European justice scoreboard, another arm of the coalition government was signing up to the creation of the first EU judicial institution to operate on British territory and exercise jurisdiction over British nationals. 

The institution is the Unified Patent Court, a two-tiered, multi-legged institution which will have exclusive jurisdiction for litigation relating to European patents. Since the February 2013 agreement by 25 EU member states to set up the court, the UK has been quietly getting on with the steps required to make it happen.

These include parliamentary procedures to ratify the agreement under the Intellectual Property Act 2014 and preparing the ground for the parts of the institution to be based in the UK: the section of the central division dealing with chemical and pharmaceutical cases and the UK Local Division. This week, the energetic intellectual property minister, Baroness Neville-Rolfe, announced that premises had been secured in Aldgate Tower, on the edge of the City for the purpose. 'This will further strengthen UK’s legal and professional services sector, and reinforce London’s status as a world leading centre for dispute resolution,' she said.

I imagine most readers will cheer that sentiment, along with the demonstration that ministers are capable of resisting the temptation to grandstand in matters EU. (It may help that Neville-Rolfe, a former director of corporate and legal affairs at Tesco, has a background in business rather than politics.)

All this effort and expenditure may yet be in vain, however. It is still not certain that the court will come into being, that its business model will succeed - and that the UK will play a part anyway. 

The agreement to set up the court requires ratification by 13 of the 25 participating states. Two and a half years after the agreement was signed, only eight governments have got that far: the latest was Portugal, earlier this month. The laggards include two states which must ratify the agreement for it to enter force: the UK and Germany. While the UK's ratification process is due to be concluded next spring, ratification could yet fail in countries such as Ireland, where a referendum is required. 

Meanwhile, a consultation on the court's rules on fees and recoverable costs seems to have revealed some flaws in the proposed working model. A detailed response by the Law Society's Intellectual Property Committee points out that the model has two potentially competing objectives: to be self-funding while ensuring access to justice for all. Self-funding is a 'distinguishing and ambitious feature' more appropriate to an arbitration model funded by the parties. Yet 'It is not clear why an arbitration model for fees... has not been proposed'.

The paper goes on to make recommendations on value-based fees, financial support for deserving litigants and caps on cost recovery.

Whatever system emerges will be watched closely by HM Courts and Tribunals Service and the Ministry of Justice as a model for all commercial courts - particularly if it achieves the nirvana of self-funding and access to justice. 

Assuming, of course, that the UK is in on the game in the first place. The court's implementation timetable is now slipping perilously close to that of the UK's in-out referendum, which must be held by the end of 2017. Unlike in 1975, the no campaign - whether led by Corbynite Labour or a Conservative party unconvinced by whatever promises are obtained from Brussels by David Cameron - could catch the public mood. 

So far, the court's reaction seems to have been to ignore the possibility.

Yet if a unitary European patent system and court are worth having within the EU, then the UK's participation is worth preserving after Brexit. Mechanisms may well exist to make this happen - for example several contracting states of the European Patent Office are not EU members, while three EU member states have declined to join the court.

However confidence in the court will only be maintained if the implementation process takes the possibility of Brexit in mind, and does so openly.