News and Publications

EPO amends the Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal (RPBA)

Last year, HOFFMANN EITLE reported on our response to planned changes to the RPBA, which govern appeal proceedings before the Boards of Appeal. The EPO has now amended the RPBA, taking some of our...

Milan Secures Third Central Division Seat of the UPC

On January 26, 2024, the Unified Patent Court (UPC) and Italy reached a milestone with the finalization of the Headquarters Agreement for the UPC's Central Division's third seat in Milan. This deve...

EPO Appeal case provides further guidance on claim interpretation

Can the description be used for claim interpretation, and if so, when? This question has been a major topic of recent EPO case law. Lasse Weinmann, Leo Polz and Sebastian Giese of HOFFMANN EITLE’s...

Announcement of the Irish referendum on Unified Patent Court

The Irish Enterprise Minister Simon Coveney has secured Cabinet approval to draft legislation for a referendum on the Unified Patent Court (UPC). The government is now set to craft the wording f...

Burden of Proof on Sufficiency of Disclosure – Does it automatically shift between instances at the EPO?

Sufficiency of disclosure or the lack thereof is a ground of opposition before the EPO and thus often one major battleground in EPO opposition proceedings, in particular for patents where compositi...

Case Report CFI 2/2023 – 10x Genomics vs. NanoString – Provisional Injunction I

1. Background and Summary Three and a half months after opening its doors on June 1st, the UPC issued its first substantive decision in case UPC_CFI_2/2023, a request for a provisional injunction...

HOFFMANN EITLE congratulates newly qualified German Patent Attorneys in 2023

We are happy to welcome four new German Patent Attorneys to our team, and therefore, congratulate Andreas Beer (Mechanical Engineering, Munich) Saskia-Berenice Gressel (Biotechnology, Munich)...

HOFFMANN EITLE Quarterly Newsletter 12/23

Dear Colleagues and Friends, In this issue of the Hoffmann Eitle Quarterly, we begin by discussing a groundbreaking decision by the UK Patents Court which held that an artificial neural network in...

Analysis of G 1/22 and G 2/22

G1/22 and G2/22: The EPO's Enlarged Board of Appeal decision on the entitlement to priority The decision of the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) in the cases G1/22 and G2/22 concerns the right to cl...

Abolition of the EPO's "10-Day Notification Rule"

The EPO's "10-day notification rule" will no longer apply to communications issued by the EPO on or after November 1, 2023. For example, if the EPO issues a communication of intension to grant (Ru...