High-level Changes at the European Patent Office

Originally published May 17, 2010

This July, Benoît Battistelli will take charge as the next president of the European Patent Office (EPO). Mr. Battistelli comes to the EPO from the French Institute for Industrial Property, where he served as director general for the past six years. He will succeed the current EPO president, Alison Brimelow.  U.S. applicants should watch closely. As Ms. Brimelow's tenure has shown, a new EPO president can mean big changes in prosecuting patents abroad.

For many years, it had been common practice, at least among U.S. companies, to amend the claims of their European applications to mirror those of their U.S. counterparts. The motivating philosophy was often to capitalize on the results of U.S. prosecution, which usually was well advanced by the time European prosecution had begun.