The EPO Ten-Day Notification Rule Is Abolished: Practical Examples

In view of the ongoing digital transformation in the patent grant procedure at the European Patent Office (EPO), the European Patent Convention (EPC) rules concerning the presentation requirements of documents submitted in proceedings before the EPO have been amended. These EPC amendments will enter into force on 1 November 2023 and will thus notably apply to each EPO document issued on that date or later, whenever the document date triggers a time limit. This is the case, for example, of Office Actions issued by Examining Divisions.

In particular, under the existing rule, there is a notification fiction by which a document served by the EPO, be the document served by postal services or by electronic means, is deemed to be delivered to the addressee on the tenth day following its handover to the postal services or (weirdly enough, nowadays) on the tenth day following its transmission by means of electronic communication ("ten-day notification rule"). This rule will