Wednesday, August 03, 2016 T 1717/13 - How many tries should you get in OP?

How many tries should an opposition division allow a proprietor to rectify an added subject matter problem? After the opposition division had maintained its added subject matter objections during the oral proceedings, the proprietor filed three more auxiliary requests. The first two were admitted into the procedure but the third was not. The reasons given in the minutes are that the third request was late filed and did not resolve an earlier objection.

In appeal the proprietor alleged that procedural violations took place. In particular, he claims that:

(a) by not admitting further claim amendments to overcome newly raised objections by the opposition division during the oral proceedings; in this respect, the opposition division exercised its discretion to disregard amendments incorrectly;

(b) by causing the patent proprietor's representative to be taken by surprise during the oral proceedings by giving contradictory reasoning, which made it difficult to react to newly raised objections;

(c) by not giving sufficient time to take into account the newly raised objections during the oral proceedings and to consider a new version of a main claim in order to be able to appropriately react to the newly raised objections.

The board gives the opposition division a wide berth to make its own decisions with respect to admitting auxiliary request or not. Some doubts are expressed about the divisions refusal to allow all  further auxiliary requests, but in the end no substantial procedure is found. 

At the end of the cited part of this decision there is also an interesting analysis of intermediate generalizations.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015 T 0970/12 - Yet another grant of re-establishment of right

This is another example where the Board of Appeal granted re-establishment of rights. Under very extraordinary circumstances and a combination of the Christmas and New years holidays, a sudden death of a close relative of the representative and the presence in the office of a trainee that did not know the correct procedures, the date for filing the Notice of Appeal was missed. The Board did not make much fuss and granted the re-establishment of rights.

Summary of Facts and Submissions

I. The present appeal lies from a decision of the examining division refusing European patent application No. 09166600.8, published as EP 2111855, under Article 97(2) EPC. The application was filed as a divisional application of European patent application No. 07007272.3, published as EP 1847256 (parent application).