Under the European Patent Convention (EPC), applicants and patent proprietors have remedies at their disposal if they lose their rights due to a missed time limit before the European Patent Office (EPO).
Depending on the cause of the missed deadline and the time that has lapsed since, it may be possible to recover those rights.
To successfully request a re-establishment of rights, two critical conditions must be met:
- A timely request: the request must be filed within the applicable time limit, usually two months or one year, depending on the specific act concerned.
- Valid reasoning: compelling reasons for missing the deadline must be provided by the applicant.
Under Article 122(1) EPC, a request for re-establishment of rights is a remedy of last resort. It allows an applicant or a proprietor to recover lost rights only if they missed an EPO deadline despite having taken “all due care required by the circumstances”.
