Deteriorating patent quality: EPO under fire, management is not impressed

The time available per file can be estimated from official EPO data (published in the EPO reports): average number of files per examiner = (applications processed to a conclusion) / (number of examiners) You can find a summary of the number of applications processed to a conclusion and the number of examiners in the article "The European Patent Office – The Story in Numbers – Part 2" by James Ward and Frances Wilding. That article shows the data from 1978 to 2020. Based on that data, you can estimate how many files every examiner processed per year.

examiners are now and then involved in many other activities which can fluctuate a lot, I know that for sure, finalized procedures depend also on these extra activities, on the number of searches done, on how many examiners work part time, etc. so that figure cannot be considered quality relevant. What I would like to see are real procedural cases that prove the degradation, and not generic data or irrelevant Board of Appeal statistics. In our law firm we log any kind of data but apart from issues with few specific examiners we cannot confirm any trend over time, but I would be happy to see cases that show a generally negative tendency: without a deep analysis of these specific cases it is all politics with an unclear (to me) hidden agenda

Dear law sniffer, Either you are part of the upper management of the EPO or you have very good contacts with the latter. In any case, you seem to have gripes with some examiners, but this is not a reason to generalise your negative impression of them. Nowadays, examiners are primarily at the office to deal with files, sorry “products”, and no time should be spent on “extra-curricular” activities. Examiners can indulge in activities outside their normal duties, but in principle the production figures are not changed and the time for those activities have to be taken from their annual leave. Your argument is thus beside the point, and a rough estimate of the time spent per file can be given. Furthermore the objectives to be fulfilled are regularly increased under the pretext of better IT tools, streamlining of the procedures and the like. furthermore, why should Board of Appeal statistics be irrelevant? As the boards of appeal are the last instance, it is possible to see on the basis of which documents an OD has taken its decision, and whether or not a board has confirmed the OD’s decision. The number of cases in which a board has set aside the decision of an OD is way beyond anything reasonable. It is 40%+ from all OD’s decision for 2022. The number of cases an opponent comes with documents available in the search files, but not found during the original search is astounding=90%+. It is only in a very limited number of cases in which the opponents come with documents truly not available in the search files. When for instance, an opponent comes with a prior art under Art 54(3), sometimes from the proprietor itself, something must have gone wrong. When the search report established by the EPO mentions lots of A or X documents and the opponent comes with a true novelty killer or a combination of documents allowing to deny IS, and those documents are in the classes searched or even in the same class as the patent, something must manifestly have gone wrong. I can agree that the results found after an appeal in opposition cannot be generalised, as there are some areas in which there are no oppositions and other laden with them. Nowadays oppositions are not filed for fun, but the granted patent hinders the presence on the market of some products or future products, patents opposed are those which manifestly have an economic interest. If those patents do not sustain scrutiny, there is manifestly a problem ahead of the opposition procedure. When roughly 85% of the patents come out maimed from the opposition procedure, the results cannot be said to be insignificant and show a clear tendency towards less quality of the patents granted. If the Quality Charter of the EPO published in the autumn of 2022 would apply in full, the IPQC would have no reason to complain. Besides beautifully phrased sentences, there is not substance in this document. The EPO keeps claiming that user satisfaction surveys are still very positive, but the actual questions are never published. What matters is not the result of a user satisfaction survey but the result of the judicial review of the decisions taken by first instance divisions. This result is anything but in favour of the EPO and its upper management.

dont worry I dont generalize at all, I appreciate most of the examiners, especially some less experienced, they do a fantastic job and are enthusiastic, and their quality and comprehension of patent matters have improved over the last years, I dont know anyone of the EPO managers and I would like to have access to files that show the meant degradation because I havent seen any so far, I am not saying that all files are treated correctly, the quality is maybe low if you prefer so, but I cannot absolutely see any degradation over the last 15 years, at least from my small perspective