Patent Protection in the Netherlands: The Registration Patent, the PCT Gap, and a Reform on the Horizon

Posted on July 10, 2026 by Dr. Dirk Franke

The Netherlands occupies a special position in European patent law that many applicants only discover once they actually have to work with it: a Dutch national patent is, to this day, granted without any substantive examination of novelty or inventive step — a pure “registration patent”. At the same time, a PCT application currently cannot be converted directly into the Dutch national phase. Both points are the subject of a far-reaching reform that, at the time of writing, is still working its way through the legislative process. The overview below sets out the current legal position and the changes on the horizon.

1. Direct Filing: A National Patent Application in the Netherlands

A direct, stand-alone national patent application with the Dutch patent office — Octrooicentrum Nederland, part of the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), based in The Hague — is possible at any time, whether as a first filing or as a subsequent filing claiming a foreign priority under the Paris Convention. This route is entirely independent of the PCT issue described below and remains the classic, unproblematic path to Dutch patent protection.

Also common in practice is the so-called “NL-PCT strategy”: a Dutch priority application is filed first at the national level; within the twelve-month priority period, an international PCT follow-up application is then filed, for which the EPO — as the competent International Searching Authority — has by then already produced a novelty report on the original Dutch application. This gives the applicant roughly two and a half years to make the eventual choice of countries based on a solid search report. This is purely a filing strategy and has nothing to do with the separate question of entering the Netherlands from a PCT application, addressed next.

2. Entering the Dutch National Phase from a PCT Application

This is where the most practically important particularity lies. Under the WIPO PCT Applicant’s Guide (in the version of the national chapter for the Netherlands current at the time of writing), the entry states explicitly: “The Office closed the national route” — the Office has closed the national phase for PCT applications. An international PCT application therefore cannot currently be converted directly into a Dutch national phase. The only competent designated/elected Office for the Netherlands under the PCT is the European Patent Office; via the PCT, only a European patent can be obtained for protection in the Netherlands, which is subsequently validated there.

Anyone seeking patent protection in the Netherlands via the PCT route must therefore go through the European phase before the EPO — a stand-alone Dutch follow-up filing derived directly from a PCT application is, under current law, not available. This is one of the central changes the legislative reform described below is intended to remove.

3. Formal Requirements

A Dutch direct filing requires a description, claims, drawings where applicable, and an abstract; an official novelty search is mandatory and, under a cooperation arrangement, is generally carried out by the EPO. Applicants without a residence or seat in the Netherlands must appoint a registered Dutch patent attorney (octrooigemachtigde), listed in the Register of Patent Attorneys (Octrooigemachtigdenregister), for the conduct of proceedings; this is not strictly required merely to secure a filing date, but it is required for further prosecution. As elsewhere in Europe, the term of protection is 20 years from the filing date, subject to payment of renewal fees.

4. Language

The description of a Dutch patent application may be filed in either Dutch or English — a useful cost saving where a European or international follow-up application in an EPO procedural language is planned anyway. The claims, by contrast, must be in Dutch; if they are initially filed in another language, a Dutch translation must be filed within three months of being requested to do so. The language of proceedings before the Office is otherwise Dutch.

5. Particularities of Dutch Patent Law

The registration patent. The substantive patentability requirements under the Rijksoctrooiwet 1995 (novelty, inventive step, industrial applicability) are harmonised with the EPC. They are not, however, examined by the Office of its own motion before grant: the Office merely produces a novelty search report, but grants the patent regardless of its outcome. Whether an invention was, in fact, novel and inventive is only established if the patent is challenged in court. This makes Dutch patents quick and inexpensive to obtain, but legally less robust than examined patents — a trade-off that has been the subject of criticism for years.

The advisory opinion procedure (Art. 76 ROW 1995). Anyone wishing to argue the invalidity of a Dutch patent in court must submit to the court an advisory opinion from Octrooicentrum Nederland on the grounds of invalidity. This opinion is not binding, but in practice provides an initial, technically grounded assessment of validity — often the basis for an out-of-court settlement.

The prohibition of double protection vis-à-vis the European patent (Art. 77 ROW 1995). Where both a Dutch national patent and a European patent are granted for the same invention with the same filing or priority date, the Dutch national patent loses its effect once the European patent becomes unassailable. If the European patent is later (partially) revoked, the national patent does not revive. In practice, this means that building up parallel protection through both routes is not an additional safeguard — it results in the loss of the national right.

No opposition procedure. There is no opposition procedure comparable to that before the EPO; review of validity takes place exclusively before the ordinary courts, supplemented by the advisory opinion procedure described above.

Unitary Patent and the UPC. The Netherlands is a contracting state to the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court and has participated in the Unitary Patent system from the outset. A Unitary Patent, or a classic European patent litigated before the UPC, accordingly takes effect in the Netherlands without separate validation — a contrast, for instance, with the Czech Republic or Poland, which (as of this article) have not yet ratified the UPC Agreement.

6. The Reform on the Horizon: the Nieuwe Rijksoctrooiwet (NROW)

In early 2026, the Dutch government agreed on a fundamental reform of patent law. Its legislative process is, at the time of writing, still underway and it is accordingly not yet in force. The central proposed changes are:

  • Reintroduction of the examined patent. In future, a Dutch patent is to be granted only once novelty, inventive step and sufficiency of disclosure have been officially examined — the current pure registration system would end for new applications. This would considerably increase the legal certainty of granted patents, but is likely, in return, to lengthen and raise the cost of examination.
  • Opening up PCT national-phase entry. International applicants would in future be able to enter the Dutch national phase directly from a PCT application, without having to take the detour via the European phase before the EPO — precisely the gap described in point 2 above.
  • Protection for the North Sea economic zone. Patent protection is to be explicitly extended to the exclusive economic zone in the North Sea — relevant, for example, to offshore wind energy and cable and pipeline infrastructure.
  • Easier third-party objections against patents considered by third parties to have been wrongly granted, as a kind of corrective for the disappearing pure registration principle.

As the legislative process is still in parliamentary deliberation, neither the exact date of entry into force nor the final shape of the transitional provisions for pending applications has been settled. Applicants with pending Dutch proceedings should keep track of further developments, since it may become possible to request examination voluntarily for applications already pending.

Conclusion for IP Practice

  • Direct filing: unrestricted. A national Dutch patent application — whether a first filing or a subsequent filing — can be filed with Octrooicentrum Nederland at any time.
  • PCT national-phase entry: currently unavailable. Anyone seeking protection in the Netherlands via the PCT must go through the European phase before the EPO; a direct Dutch national phase does not currently exist.
  • Language flexible, claims mandatorily in Dutch. The description may be filed in English; the claims must be in Dutch (at the latest, within three months of being requested).
  • Registration patent, not examined patent — for now. Dutch patents are, to date, granted without substantive examination, making them fast and inexpensive but legally less robust than examined rights.
  • Mind the double-protection bar. Parallel protection through a national and a European patent for the same invention results in the loss of the national patent once the European patent becomes unassailable — it is not an additional safeguard.
  • Reform is coming. The planned Nieuwe Rijksoctrooiwet would reintroduce examination and close the PCT national-phase gap, but remains in the legislative process for now.

Photo: © Nicolas Raymond, [CC BY 2.0]

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Can Relevant Prior Art Be “Hidden” Behind the Closest Prior Art?

Posted on July 9, 2026 by Dr. Dirk Franke
European Patent Office

Under EPC patent law, can more relevant — in particular, technically closer — prior art be “hidden” by instead relying on a different document with a similar purpose as the closest prior art (CPA)? The question is sharpened by the suspicion that the skilled person might somehow become “less skilled” if the more relevant document was published later and is therefore not considered as a starting point. The short answer is: No. Neither the chronological order of prior publications nor the choice of a document with a similar purpose can shield relevant prior art from examination. At the same time, the question does expose a genuine weak point of the approach — the imprecision inherent in the selection stage.

1. The Skilled Person Knows the Entire State of the Art

The skilled person under the EPC is not a real-world searcher who finds some documents and overlooks others, but a legal fiction. This person is deemed to have had access to the entire state of the art under Art. 54(2) EPC. The publication date determines only whether a document forms part of the prior art at all (publication before the filing or priority date) — not whether it is “findable”. Two documents published before the relevant date are equally available, regardless of which one appeared first. “Hiding” relevant prior art through later (but still pre-published) publication is therefore excluded from the outset.

2. Selecting the Closest Prior Art

Under the Guidelines for Examination, G-VII, 5.1, the closest prior art is a document directed to a similar purpose or effect — or at least belonging to the same or a closely related technical field — that requires the fewest structural and functional modifications. This purpose-based criterion is the hindsight-free criterion: the purpose of a document can be determined independently of the claimed solution. Selecting the CPA based merely on the number of features shared with the claim, by contrast, would itself be tainted by hindsight, since it presupposes knowledge of the claim.

3. Multiple Realistic Starting Points

Under settled case law (T 967/97, T 21/08, confirmed in T 1742/12), where the skilled person has several viable routes starting from different documents, inventive step must be assessed against all of these routes. If the invention is obvious from even a single realistic route, inventive step is lacking. Two consequences follow: a document with a less similar purpose is not discarded merely because the document with the more similar purpose failed to lead to the invention; and, conversely, a finding of non-obviousness starting from the purpose-related document does not save the invention if it is obvious from another realistic starting point.

T 1742/12 frames this as a logical inversion: a document from which the invention is obvious is, by definition, the “more promising springboard” compared with one from which it is not. And T 405/14 makes clear that the closest prior art need not be the technically closest document: a document sharing the same purpose and many features often does not support a convincing obviousness objection, whereas the invention may follow, without hindsight, as obvious from an apparently less promising document.

4. Hindsight in the Selection Stage — and Where It Is Actually Controlled

The objection that choosing a less purpose-related CPA is itself an act of hindsight is, in part, correct. In T 855/15, the Board held that the question of whether the skilled person “would” select a document in order to arrive at the claimed invention is itself hindsight. A results-oriented selection of the springboard is therefore impermissible. That said, the mere technical distance of a document does not, on its own, exclude its use as a starting point.

Hindsight is accordingly not controlled by prohibiting distant starting points, but at two other stages of the analysis:

  • The “could-would” approach: The path from the starting point to the invention must show that the skilled person actually would have made the modification without knowledge of the solution — not merely could have.
  • A hindsight-free technical problem (T 605/20): The objective technical problem must not be formulated using the solution itself. Where the problem is tailored so as to already point toward the solution, this is precisely where the prohibited hindsight lies.

In practice, distant starting points typically fail at this second stage: they require more modifications, and for each one, a hindsight-free “would” — rather than merely “could” — must be established.

5. The Procedural Asymmetry

To reject a claim, one realistic starting point suffices, and under T 967/97 its selection need not be specifically justified. To uphold inventive step, by contrast, the invention must withstand analysis from all realistic routes. This asymmetry means that any imprecision in the selection stage tends to work in the attacker’s favour — a key reason why the doctrine remains controversial.

6. Criticism: The Imprecision of the Selection Stage

Terms such as “realistic”, “similar purpose” and “neighbouring field” have no objectively sharp boundaries. Since a chain of reasoning cannot be sharper than its least precise link, the overall assessment inherits this indeterminacy — even where the later steps are more disciplined. Parts of the academic literature accordingly describe “closest prior art” as a misleading concept.

The EPO’s defence is not that the concept is, after all, objective, but that its imprecision is rendered harmless: the multiple-starting-points doctrine dissolves the ranking question (“is A or B closer?”) because it never needs to be answered in the first place (T 1742/12: suitability rather than proximity). Moreover, the imprecision sits only at the margin — with borderline “realistic” documents — and this margin is caught in any event by the could-would stage. Finally, legal terms such as “similar” or “reasonable” are standards, not algorithms; their binding force arises from the duty to give reasons, from case-by-case development, and from appellate review. “Not objectively sharp” therefore means bounded discretion, not arbitrariness.

The honest assessment lies in between: the method is not fully objective, but nor is it arbitrary. It is a structured value judgment — and just how tightly that structure binds remains a genuine point of dispute.

7. Contrast with the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH)

The German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) deliberately takes a less schematic approach. It does not require a search for the “closest” prior art, but rather a comprehensibly reasoned, purpose-oriented selection decision by the skilled person. This does not eliminate subjectivity, but it does raise the burden of reasoning for the choice of starting point.

8. Conclusion

Relevant prior art cannot be “hidden” either by later publication or by the choice of a purpose-related CPA: the fictional skilled person knows everything, and any more relevant document can itself serve as a (further) realistic starting point for an obviousness attack. The legitimate core of the objection does not concern “hiding” as such, but rather the imprecision of the selection stage — which the EPO does not control at the selection stage itself, but only at the subsequent, hindsight-free obviousness analysis.

Overview: Relevant EPO Decisions

Case numberKeywordCore holding
T 967/97Multiple starting points / no justification required for choiceWhere several viable routes exist, inventive step must be assessed against all of them; no special justification is required for the choice of starting point when denying inventive step. What matters is suitability, not “proximity”.
T 21/08All realistic routesConfirms: if the invention is obvious from even a single realistic route, inventive step is lacking.
T 1742/12Most promising springboardA document from which the invention is obvious is, by definition, the more promising springboard; a different purpose does not bar the analysis (with T 824/05).
T 405/14Closest ≠ technically nearestA document with the same purpose and many shared features often does not support a convincing obviousness objection, whereas an apparently less promising document may lead to the invention without hindsight.
T 1841/11Similar purpose sufficesA document with a similar purpose is not disqualified as CPA merely because another document with the same purpose exists.
T 855/15Hindsight in the selection stageAsking whether the skilled person “would” select a document in order to arrive at the claimed invention is itself hindsight. Mere distance, however, does not exclude the document from consideration.
T 605/20Hindsight-free technical problemThe objective technical problem must not be formulated using the solution.

Legal basis: Articles 54(2), 56 EPC; Guidelines for Examination, G-VII, 5.1. Further decision cited: T 824/05 (with T 1742/12).

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The Quiet Cost Creep: How the EPO Has Multiplied Its Fees, Step by Step, in Recent Years

Posted on July 7, 2026 by Dr. Dirk Franke
European Patent Office

When the European Patent Office (EPO) announces a fee increase, the headline number is usually reassuring: “an average of 4%”, “around 5%”. These percentages are technically correct — and still misleading. They describe the mean across a fee schedule with well over a hundred line items, most of which any given applicant only ever pays a fraction of. Anyone who actually goes through a typical European patent procedure — a double-digit claim count, a PCT phase with a non-European search authority, the occasional divisional application, and ten or more years of renewal payments — experiences a very different cost trajectory. Alongside the regular, well-publicised fee rounds, the EPO has over the last decade and a half made a series of structural changes that individually made few headlines but add up to a substantial sum. Five of them are worth a closer look.

1. The Vanished Discount for Euro-PCT Applications with a Non-European Search Authority

Anyone who files an international application (PCT) with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the Japanese Patent Office (JPO), the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), the Chinese patent office (CNIPA) or the Russian patent office as the International Searching Authority (ISA), and subsequently enters the European phase, must pay the EPO for a supplementary European search — after all, the EPO did not carry out the original international search itself. Until 2018, this supplementary search fee was reduced by a fixed amount for exactly this scenario: the reduction had been introduced in 2005 by decision of the Administrative Council (CA/D 10/05) and applied to applications whose international search had been carried out by the USPTO, JPO, KIPO, CNIPA, the Russian office (Rospatent) or the Australian patent office.

By decision of 13 December 2017 (CA/D 16/17, published in OJ EPO 2018, A3), the Administrative Council abolished this reduction outright as of 1 April 2018, with no replacement. Since then, applicants whose PCT search was carried out by one of these major non-European offices pay the full supplementary search fee — currently €1,595 (as of April 2026). The reduction survives only for a small group of European partner offices: Austria, Finland, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, plus the Nordic Patent Institute and the Visegrad Patent Institute.

In practice, this means that entry into the European phase has become noticeably more expensive since 2018 for exactly the applicants who most often route their PCT applications through the USPTO, JPO, KIPO or CNIPA as ISA — namely US, Japanese, Korean and Chinese applicants — without this showing up in any of the EPO’s regular “fee increase” announcements. It is not a fee increase in the strict sense; it is the quiet removal of a discount, with the same effect on the final invoice.

2. New and Rising Fees for Divisional Applications

Since 1 April 2014, the EPO has charged an additional filing fee for divisional applications of the second and any subsequent generation (decision CA/D 15/13 of 16 October 2013, OJ EPO 2014, A22). First-generation divisionals are exempt; from the second generation onward, the additional fee rises progressively, becoming a flat amount from the fifth generation. The EPO’s stated purpose was to make “long sequences of divisional applications” — and the resulting extension of pendency — less attractive.

When introduced in 2014, the additional fees were €210 (2nd generation), €420 (3rd generation), €630 (4th generation) and €840 (5th generation and beyond). Today the same line items stand at €235, €480, €715 and €955 respectively — an increase of 12–14% since introduction, even though this fee was untouched by the headline 2024 and 2026 reforms.

The real cost driver for divisionals now lies elsewhere, however: every divisional application requires retroactive payment of all renewal fees from the third year of the original filing date onward. Since precisely those early renewal fees — as shown below — have risen the most since 2024, filing a divisional today is substantially more expensive than it was just two years ago, even without the divisional-specific fee itself having moved.

3. Claims Fees: From an Afterthought to a Fixed Cost Item

Before 2008, a high claim count at the EPO was almost inconsequential: each claim from the eleventh onward carried a modest fee of €45. On 1 April 2008, the Administrative Council raised this amount for the 16th and each subsequent claim to €200 — a fourfold jump in one step. Just a year later, on 1 April 2009, the second stage followed: a separate, much higher rate of €500 was introduced for the 51st and each subsequent claim, described by commentators at the time as “draconian”.

Since then, this rate too has climbed steadily: as of 1 April 2024, the fee for the 16th to 50th claim rose from €265 to €275, and the fee for the 51st and each subsequent claim from €660 to €685. On 1 April 2026, further increases brought these to €290 and €720 respectively. Taken together, that is a roughly 45% increase over the 2009 starting point — for an application with, say, 60 claims (not unusual in many technical fields), claims fees alone quickly add up to a four-figure sum.

4. The Two-Tier Appeal Fee: An Increase Dressed Up as a Discount

Until 2018, appeals before the EPO’s Boards of Appeal carried a single, uniform fee: €1,880, regardless of who filed the appeal. On 1 April 2018, the Administrative Council introduced a two-tier structure: for natural persons, SMEs, non-profit organisations, universities and public research organisations (the entities listed in Rule 6(4) and (5) EPC), the fee stayed at €1,880. For every other appellant — in practice, any company that does not qualify as an SME — the fee rose to €2,255.

On 1 April 2020, the next step followed: the standard fee jumped to €2,705, while the reduced fee edged up only modestly to €1,955. Today the rates stand at €2,925 (standard) and €2,015 (reduced) — figures that were left unchanged in 2024, and are accordingly reported in official communications as “no change”, even though they are the result of the two very substantial increases that preceded them.

Taken as a whole, the appeal fee for the majority of represented clients — companies that are not SMEs — has risen from €1,880 to €2,925 since 2018, an increase of around 56%. The “reduced” fee reserved for individual inventors, SMEs and universities grew by only about 7% over the same period (€1,880 to €2,015). The official narrative consistently emphasises the social dimension — protecting smaller applicants — while obscuring the fact that a substantial fee increase was simply introduced for the majority of appeals actually filed, packaged as the creation of a new discount category. Anyone reading only the “appeal fee unchanged” announcements from 2024 and 2026 would never see this increase at all.

5. The “Linearisation” of Renewal Fees — the Biggest Lever

By far the largest, and least “quiet”, intervention concerns the renewal fees for the third to tenth year. Historically, these fees did not rise evenly but featured a conspicuous jump at the sixth year, reflecting the shorter average pendency times of earlier decades. By decision of 14 December 2023 (CA/D 16/23), effective 1 April 2024, the Administrative Council “linearised” this curve — with the stated aim of offsetting the revenue shortfall caused by significantly shorter average time-to-grant. Shorter pendency means fewer years in which the EPO itself collects renewal fees (after grant, they flow to the national offices instead) — the Office’s response was to raise sharply the early renewal fees that are still paid to the EPO.

The table below shows the trajectory from the pre-April-2024 level to the most recent increase on 1 April 2026 (decision CA/D 9/25 of 11 December 2025, roughly +5% across the board):

Renewal feepre-04/2024from 04/2024from 04/2026Total increase
Year 3€530€690€725+37%
Year 4€660€845€885+34%
Year 5€925€1,000€1,050+14%
Year 6€1,180€1,155€1,215+3%
Year 7€1,305€1,310€1,375+5%
Year 8€1,440€1,465€1,540+7%
Year 9€1,570€1,620€1,700+8%
Years 10–20€1,775€1,775€1,865+5%

The distribution is telling: the third- and fourth-year renewal fees — which practically every applicant must pay, regardless of whether the application is ultimately granted, refused, or withdrawn — rose the most, by +37% and +34% respectively. The sixth-year fee was actually cut slightly in 2024, before rising again in 2026. For a procedure of normal length, the net effect is a substantial front-loading of cost into the earlier, less certain years of the procedure.

6. Further Increases in the Slipstream of the Reforms

The 2024 and 2026 reforms also raised the other core procedural fees, if more moderately:

  • Search fee: €1,460 → €1,520 (2024) → €1,595 (2026), a total of +9%
  • Examination fee: €1,840 → €1,915 → €2,010, +9%
  • Designation fee: €660 → €685 → €720, +9%
  • Grant fee: €1,040 → €1,080 → €1,135, +9%

By deliberate contrast, the filing fee, the opposition fee, and — since 2020 — the appeal fee were left unchanged, a fact the EPO is happy to highlight in its communications because it makes entry into the procedure look inexpensive. That framing, however, distracts from where the real cost dynamics play out — as shown above: in claims fees, in divisional applications, in the search fee for Euro-PCT cases with a non-European ISA, in the appeal fee for companies, and above all in the early renewal fees.

7. Worked Example: A Divisional Application Compared, 2012 vs. 2026

To see how these individual effects add up in practice, consider a concrete example. Assume a second-generation divisional application, filed online, with 18 claims (three claims above the fee-free threshold of 15) and a 55-page specification (20 pages above the fee-free threshold of 35 pages). Due are the filing, search, examination and designation fees, the excess claims and excess pages fees, the renewal fees for years 3 through 6, and finally the grant fee. Compare the fee schedule of 1 April 2012 (decision CA/D 6/11 of 27 October 2011) with the current schedule as of 1 April 2026:

Fee item2012Qty2012 total20262026 totalIncrease
Filing fee (online)€1151€115€135€135+17%
Additional fee, 2nd-generation divisional(did not exist)1€0€235€235new
Excess pages fee (20 pages over 35)€14/page20€280€17/page€340+21%
Excess claims fee (3 claims over 15)€225/claim3€675€290/claim€870+29%
Search fee€1,1651€1,165€1,595€1,595+37%
Designation fee€5551€555€720€720+30%
Examination fee€1,5551€1,555€2,010€2,010+29%
Renewal fee, year 3€4451€445€725€725+63%
Renewal fee, year 4€5551€555€885€885+59%
Renewal fee, year 5€7751€775€1,050€1,050+35%
Renewal fee, year 6€9951€995€1,215€1,215+22%
Grant fee€8751€875€1,135€1,135+30%
Total€7,990€10,915+37%

For exactly the same divisional application — same claim count, same page count, same procedural steps — the official fees captured here alone have risen from roughly €7,990 (2012) to roughly €10,915 (2026): an increase of €2,925, or 37%, in 14 years. The distribution is notable: the third- and fourth-year renewal fees rose by +63% and +59% respectively, far outpacing the examination or designation fees (each around +30%). And the fee for a second-generation divisional — which did not exist at all in 2012, having only been introduced in 2014 — adds a brand-new €235 cost item by 2026, with nothing about the underlying procedure having changed. Together, these two effects explain why the overall 37% increase runs well ahead of what any of the individually moderate-looking fee rounds would suggest on their own.

Conclusion for IP Practice

  • The headline understates reality. “4%” or “5%” as an average obscures the fact that individual line items — claims fees, early renewal fees — have risen by 30–45% since 2009 and 2024 respectively.
  • Not every cost increase is labelled an “increase”. The abolition of the reduced search fee for Euro-PCT applications with USPTO, JPO, KIPO, CNIPA or Rospatent as ISA (2018) appears in no fee table as an “increase”, yet it costs affected applicants real money.
  • Divisional applications are now doubly expensive: through the generation fee that has risen since 2014, and — more significantly — through the sharply increased third- and fourth-year renewal fees since 2024, which must be paid retroactively for every divisional.
  • A “discount” can mask an increase. The two-tier appeal fee introduced in 2018 has raised the standard fee for companies by around 56% to date (€1,880 to €2,925), even as official communications have reported “no change” since 2020.
  • The early years carry the main burden. The linearisation of renewal fees shifts cost to exactly the point where practically every applicant must pay, regardless of the outcome of the procedure.
  • The worked example confirms the finding. For an identical divisional application (18 claims, 20 pages over the free threshold, renewal fees for years 3–6), official fees have risen from roughly €7,990 (2012) to roughly €10,915 (2026) — a 37% increase for an unchanged procedure.
  • Filing strategy matters more than ever. Trimming claim counts before filing, choosing the PCT search authority deliberately, scrutinising divisional chains critically, and making payments ahead of the relevant cut-off date (1 April) wherever the time limits allow — these are the most effective levers against a fee burden that has grown considerably faster in recent years than the official percentages suggest.
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When the Description Reads Along: G 1/24, AI-Assisted Drafting, and the Firm’s New Liability Risk

Posted on July 5, 2026 by Dr. Dirk Franke

For decades, the description was the quiet part of a patent application. The music played in the claims; the description supplied background, embodiments, and fallback positions. As long as the claims were clear on their own, the exact wording of the description had few consequences in examination or litigation. Two developments are now unsettling this division of labor — and, of all places, they converge at exactly the same point. Legally, the EPO’s Enlarged Board of Appeal, with G 1/24, has elevated the description to a permanent tool of interpretation. Technologically, artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly taking over the drafting of that very text. For law firms, this creates a risk that is easily overlooked: the AI’s efficiency gain is concentrated exactly where the duty of care is rising the fastest.

What G 1/24 Actually Decided

With its decision of 18 June 2025, the Enlarged Board of Appeal put an end to a long-simmering divergence in EPO case law. The core holding: the description and drawings must always be consulted when interpreting the claims for the purpose of assessing patentability — not only once a claim, read on its own, appears unclear or ambiguous. The underlying case concerned the interpretation of a single term (“gathered sheet”) in a patent; the Board used it to settle a fundamental question about how Articles 69 and 84 EPC interact.

Two points matter for practice. First, the decision harmonizes EPO practice with that of the Unified Patent Court and the national courts. What is written in the description will henceforth be read alongside the claims according to the same basic principle in examination, opposition, and infringement proceedings alike. The description thus moves from the periphery to the center of claim interpretation. Second — and precision matters here — the Board holds that the description must always be consulted for interpretation; it does not hold that the description may override an otherwise clear claim at will. The practical effect is therefore not a blank check to reinterpret every claim from the description. But it does shift the weight considerably: every definition, every use of a term, every statement about “the invention” can now influence how the claims are interpreted.

This is reinforced by a further, still open issue. Referral G 1/25 raises the question whether the description must be adapted to the claims prior to grant. Both directions carry risk: leaving contradictions in place may dilute the interpretation; adapting the description risks impermissible extensions (Art. 123(2) EPC) and unintended shifts in the scope of protection. However G 1/25 is decided, the message is already clear: the description is no longer neutral background text but an effective tool of interpretation.

From Background Text to a Sharp Tool

This changes the character of drafting itself. In the past, the description could be written generously, redundantly, and with many variants — extra sentences rarely did harm. After G 1/24, the opposite is true: every sentence now carries a potential interpretive effect. A definition that is broader or narrower than intended now counts. An offhand statement about the purpose or advantage of “the invention” can support a narrowing interpretation. An embodiment that promises more than the claim actually covers can become a point of attack. And terms used one way in one place and differently elsewhere create exactly the kind of inconsistency a court will now have to resolve — not necessarily in the patentee’s favor.

The description has thus become an instrument that demands consistency, terminological discipline, and a precise awareness of the interpretive consequences of every word. These are exactly the qualities that AI-generated text systematically struggles with.

Where the AI-Drafted Description Tips Over

AI can produce descriptions in a fraction of the time previously required — fluent, extensive, plausible. That is tempting, because the description is the most text-heavy and seemingly most mechanical part of drafting. But it is precisely the typical weaknesses of generative models that strike at the risks G 1/24 has sharpened:

Terminological inconsistency. Language models aim for variation and fluent phrasing, not rigid term fidelity. A model will use the same term slightly differently in different places, or introduce synonyms that carry a subtly different meaning. In a world where the description is always consulted for interpretation, that is no longer a cosmetic flaw — it is an interpretive trap.

Unsupported assertions and pseudo-embodiments. AI tends to fill gaps “sensibly” — with advantages, mechanisms of action, or variants that are not technically supported. Such passages can steer claim interpretation in an unwanted direction, and — should G 1/25 confirm a duty to adapt — become a source of Article 123(2) problems when later deleted.

Scope bias. Generative models, when in doubt, produce more text, not less. But more text means more surface area for contradictions, overreaching definitions, and incidental commitments — in other words, more of exactly what a court now consults.

Imported phrasing patterns. AI draws on training data full of other parties’ patents. It adopts “characterizing” phrases, implicit disclaimers, or purpose-bound language that quietly shifts the scope of protection — phrasing an experienced drafter would have deliberately avoided.

Definitions with a life of their own. A model likes to write its own definitions into the description. If such a definition — narrower or broader — departs from the intended claim meaning, it now has a direct effect on interpretation under G 1/24.

The insidious part is that these errors don’t look like errors. AI text reads competently and fluently. The inconsistency is not hidden in an obvious blunder but in the interplay of passages that each look innocuous on their own — and only reveal their effect once an infringement dispute arises.

The Firm’s Liability Risk

For a law firm, this bundles into a specific risk. The patent attorney is responsible; they sign the application, and they are liable if an unnoticed inconsistency in the description narrows the client’s scope of protection or brings a patent down in litigation. That responsibility cannot be delegated to a model.

The real core of the issue is a paradox. AI saves the most time exactly where G 1/24 demands the greatest care. The description used to be the part one could most safely “let run through” — and it is now the part that demands the most precise, interpretation-aware scrutiny. The apparent efficiency gain is therefore deceptive: whoever merely skims the AI-drafted description hasn’t worked faster — they have simply pushed the risk, invisibly, into the future: into examination, opposition, and infringement proceedings.

On top of that, the necessary review is not the fast kind of review. Checking an AI-drafted description for interpretive consequences means reading the entire text against the claims: for consistent terminology, for definitions, for overreaching statements about “the invention,” for unsupported embodiments. That comparison is cognitively demanding and often no faster than drafting it oneself — sometimes slower, because someone else’s plausible-sounding phrasing first has to be deconstructed to recognize its interpretive effect. The AI’s time advantage shrinks in direct proportion to the care that G 1/24 now requires.

This is not an argument against AI. It is a precise mapping of its risk: the description is the place where AI’s characteristic weaknesses meet the stakes that G 1/24 has raised. This is exactly where it is decided whether a firm has mastered AI — or whether AI has written a liability problem into the file.

What Firms Should Do Now

The analysis points to concrete safeguards that preserve AI’s efficiency gain without increasing liability:

  • Terminology and definition review. Before filing, a targeted check: is every claim-relevant term used consistently and in its intended meaning throughout the description? AI-generated synonyms and self-made definitions must be explicitly reviewed.
  • Consistency check against the claims. The description must be read as an interpretive instrument, not as continuous prose. Every statement about purpose, advantage, or “the invention” must be examined for its potentially narrowing effect.
  • Restraint with boilerplate. What counts under G 1/24 should be intentional. Overreaching embodiments and unsupported assertions are more of a risk than a fallback position.
  • G 1/25 readiness. As long as the duty to adapt remains unresolved, the description should be drafted so that later conformity amendments create as little Article 123(2) exposure as possible.
  • AI as a draft, not a result. The sensible use case is an accelerated first draft followed by a documented, human interpretive review — not unreviewed adoption.
  • Process and documentation. A firm quality-control process — who performs the interpretive review and how it is recorded — protects both the client and the firm.

Conclusion for IP Practice

  • G 1/24 makes the description a permanent tool of interpretation. It is now always consulted to interpret the claims in examination, opposition, and — harmonized — before the UPC and the national courts. Every sentence now has an interpretive consequence.
  • AI text is weakest exactly where it now matters most. Terminological inconsistency, unsupported statements, scope bias, and imported phrasing patterns are exactly the errors G 1/24 makes dangerous — and they don’t look like errors.
  • The efficiency gain concentrates the liability risk. AI saves time precisely at the point that now demands the most careful, interpretation-aware review. A superficial check doesn’t save time — it merely shifts risk.
  • The review is not the fast kind of review. Checking the description against the claims is demanding and often no faster than drafting it oneself — the real time saved is smaller than it appears.
  • The firm’s value shifts toward interpretive skill. It is not the fastest drafting that wins, but the drafting that combines AI speed with human, litigation-aware judgment about every word.

G 1/24 thus provides an unexpectedly concrete legal basis for a claim that often stays abstract in the debate over AI in the patent profession: the human remains indispensable in the process — not as a matter of principle, but because the description has become a sharp tool that can only be safely wielded with judgment. Whoever uses AI as an accelerated draft and elevates the interpretive review to the core deliverable gains both: speed and safety. Whoever lets the description “run through unchecked” writes the risk into the file.

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No Property, No Innovation: Why Socialist Patent Systems Forfeit Prosperity – The USSR, the GDR and Cuba

Posted on July 4, 2026 by Dr. Dirk Franke

A patent grants its holder the right to exclude others from using an invention. At first glance this looks anti-social — yet it is one of the most effective engines of prosperity that modern economies possess. It turns an idea into a tradable asset, makes research financeable, attracts capital, and rewards not only whoever invents a new process but whoever brings it to market. Socialist planned economies abolished precisely this right to exclude — internally. In doing so, this article argues, they sacrificed a central driver of innovation and economic power. The three cases of the Soviet Union, the GDR and Cuba show the mechanism and its price.

The economic starting point: property rights create prosperity — including intangible ones

That secure, enforceable property rights are the foundation of prosperity is among the best-supported findings in institutional economics. Douglass North showed that societies grow rich precisely where rules reliably assign the returns of productive effort to those who generate them; Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson traced differences in national wealth to “inclusive” versus “extractive” institutions, at the centre of which sits the property regime. Hernando de Soto coined the term “dead capital” for the absence of formal title: values that exist but cannot be mobilised as collateral, tradable goods, or a basis for investment.

What holds for land holds, in the knowledge economy, all the more for intangible assets. The value of modern companies today lies overwhelmingly in intangibles — patents, brands, know-how, data. A patent is the legal title that makes an invention capable of being booked, licensed, pledged and sold in the first place. Devalue that title and the invention does not disappear — but the incentive to invest in it, commercialise it and scale it does. This is exactly where the weakness of the socialist model begins.

1. The Soviet Union: invent much, exploit little

After the October Revolution, the Soviet Union nationalised inventions and created, as a socialist alternative to the patent, the inventor’s certificate (avtorskoe svidetel’stvo): the invention became state property, while the inventor received recognition and remuneration — but no right to exclude. Patents survived only as a parallel institution, used almost exclusively by foreigners. The logic behind it was deliberately anti-capitalist: knowledge was to flow freely between state enterprises rather than being locked up behind monopoly rights.

From the standpoint of institutional economics this was a consequential design flaw. The system optimised for the number of inventions and for the free flow of information — and blanked out the decisive variable: the incentive to actually turn an invention into a better product or process. Because enterprises operated as monopolies, were measured on plan fulfilment rather than competition, and the inventor’s reward was capped, the drive to introduce novelties was missing. The result is well documented in the literature as the “Soviet innovation problem”: much was invented, too little implemented and diffused. Observers attributed to Soviet patent law a dogmatic mindset that inhibited innovation rather than fostering it. Later Russian scholarship speaks of an institutional mismatch — of lost opportunities to generate growth from knowledge that already existed.

The contradiction is telling: the very institution meant to liberate knowledge decoupled inventing from exploiting — and thereby stripped the economy of the feedback loop that, in the West, turns inventions into productivity.

2. The GDR: the natural experiment

No other case illustrates the thesis as vividly as the German division — a controlled experiment with a shared language, culture and industrial history that differed only in economic system. East German patent law knew two routes: the exclusive patent (Ausschließungspatent), which corresponded to the Western patent, and the economic patent (Wirtschaftspatent), which could be used by all state-designated enterprises while the inventor received only a remuneration — capped, after the 1963 amendment, at 30,000 Mark. The state steered the choice forcefully: filing an economic patent cost 20 Mark, an exclusive patent 250 Mark, whose annual fees ran up to thirty times higher. For inventions arising in publicly owned enterprises, only the economic patent was permitted in any case.

The outcome was a patent order that effectively abolished the right to exclude: of roughly 111,000 GDR patents at reunification, only about 14,000 — just under 13 percent — were exclusive patents. A large body of protective rights thus existed with no tradable market value. The reaction, once a real market appeared, is revealing: more than 19,000 holders applied to convert their economic patent into an exclusive one. The right to exclude others became valuable at precisely the moment there were competitors and prices.

The economic record of this system is unambiguous. The GDR was regarded as the most developed country of the Eastern Bloc — and still lagged: by the late 1980s its per-capita GDP fell short of West Germany’s by around 30 percent, and labour productivity at unification stood at only about a third of the Western level. According to estimates by Akerlof and colleagues, only around ten percent of the GDR workforce was employed in firms viable at world-market prices; the East German economy collapsed in 1990/91 on a scale unprecedented in modern economic history. Research links this weakness directly to the centrally planned system, which systematically inhibited innovation, distorted the allocation of resources and undermined long-term growth. Even three decades later, and despite enormous transfers, the East reaches only around two-thirds of the Western per-capita level on many measures. Two systems, one people — and a productivity gap whose root lay substantially in the missing regime of incentives and property.

3. Cuba: the exception that proves the rule

Cuba appears to be the counter-argument: a socialist state that is a monopolist domestically and yet ranks among the notable innovators of international biotechnology. The state umbrella corporation BioCubaFarma reports around 2,640 patents in Cuba and worldwide, of which roughly 2,438 are held outside Cuba, and has registered 765 products in 53 countries. Developments such as Heberprot-P for diabetic foot ulcers, the cancer immunotherapy CIMAvax-EGF, or the COVID vaccines Abdala and Soberana are protected by patents in numerous jurisdictions.

On closer inspection, however, Cuba confirms the thesis rather than refuting it — for three reasons.

First, the success is concentrated in a narrow, state-selected niche that has been fed with prioritised resources over decades. It is the product of concentrated subsidy, not of a broad innovation culture nourished by ownership incentives. Outside this “scientific pole,” the Cuban economy is marked by chronic stagnation and by hard-currency and supply crises.

Second — and this is the decisive point — Cuba patents almost exclusively abroad. At home, where the state alone produces, the right to exclude is worthless; inventions are used freely within the country’s own health system. The patent becomes valuable only where there are markets, competitors and paying demand: in exports, in licensing, in joint ventures with foreign capital, for instance in the Mariel special development zone. To draw prosperity from its inventions, Cuba must therefore reach into precisely those property-based market economies that its own system denies internally. Here the patent is an export and hard-currency instrument — proof that innovation only creates value once it plugs into a property order.

Third, even this island runs into its limits: biotechnology is extremely capital-intensive, and capital is scarce in Cuba; the US embargo, international regulatory hurdles and a deep currency crisis constrain the returns. A state can finance world-class research at isolated points — but without the capital-forming power of tradable property rights, it cannot turn that into broad, self-sustaining economic strength.

The mechanism of failure

Bring the three cases together and a clear pattern emerges. Where the right to exclude intangibles is absent, several chains of causation collapse — the same chains that, in market economies, convert inventions into prosperity:

  • No price signal. Without exclusivity there is no market price for an invention — and therefore no information about which novelty is worth scarce resources.
  • No incentive to commercialise. Anyone who cannot exclude, and whose reward is capped, has little reason to undertake the arduous, risky work of implementation and scaling.
  • No capital formation. Intangible assets without legal title are “dead capital”: they cannot be pledged, traded or used as a basis for investment.
  • No market entry. Without company formation and competitors, the selective pressure that weeds out poor solutions and spreads good ones is missing.

The inventor’s certificate and the economic patent rewarded the inventor — but they severed the feedback between inventing and exploiting. Innovation became a cost item of the planning bureaucracy rather than a driver of productivity. The cumulative effect over decades is that very productivity gap which the German division made so relentlessly visible.

In fairness: not a plea for IP maximalism

This critique is no licence for a boundless patent system. The West, too, knows the downsides of excessive protection — patent thickets, “trolls,” blocked follow-on innovation, disputes over access to medicines. And Cuban biotechnology shows that targeted state research can produce real, humanitarically valuable results. The point is not “as much protection as possible,” but something more fundamental: an enforceable, tradable property right in intangible values is a necessary condition for turning inventions into lasting prosperity. That condition is exactly what socialist systems structurally failed to meet internally — and they paid for it in innovative capacity and economic performance.

Takeaways for IP practice

  • The right to exclude is not an end in itself but a prosperity mechanism. It makes inventions capable of being booked, financed and traded — the precondition for knowledge becoming value creation.
  • Reward without an incentive to exploit is not enough. The inventor’s certificate and the economic patent honoured the inventor without incentivising commercialisation — the GDR figures (only ~13% exclusive patents, then over 19,000 conversion requests) show where the market value really sat.
  • The German division is the litmus test. One people, two systems, a productivity gap of roughly two-thirds to one-third at unification — driven substantially by the missing regime of incentives and property.
  • Cuba confirms the rule. A monopolist patents by the thousand — but abroad, because value arises only where a property order sustains markets. Without capital formation out of intangibles, even world-class research remains an isolated island.
  • Intangible assets are today the core of corporate value. Whoever fails to secure them legally fails to mobilise them — and forfeits precisely the value creation that carries modern economies.

Socialist patent systems were no accident but the consistent application of an idea: that knowledge should belong to all. Economically, however, the uncomfortable finding holds that it was precisely the communalisation of the right to exclude that weakened the power to turn ideas into prosperity. Property — including, and especially, in intangible goods — is not an obstacle to innovation. It is its precondition.

Photo: © Nicolas Raymond, [CC BY 2.0]

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Who Survives AI? Partners, Associates and Freelance Patent Attorneys in a Shifting Firm Structure

Posted on July 4, 2026 by Dr. Dirk Franke

The debate about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the patent profession usually focuses on the firm as a whole: falling drafting fees, consolidation pressure, and competition that hands the efficiency gains to clients. In our post “When the Patent Office Becomes More Expensive Than the Attorney” we developed that macro perspective. This piece zooms in — on the people a firm is actually made of. Because AI does not hit the three load-bearing roles of the patent profession evenly. It affects them very differently.

The starting structure: three roles, three risk profiles

Over decades, the patent profession settled into a clear division of labour:

Partners held the client relationships and the authority to decide who worked a case. They billed the work in their own name and carried the firm’s entrepreneurial risk — but they also held the one decisive resource: the relationship with the client.

Associates — employed or associated patent attorneys without equity — received work as it was allocated to them and billed it back to the partners largely without risk. They traded entrepreneurial risk for the security of a steady workload. As a rule, they had no direct client contact.

Freelance patent attorneys were brought in selectively: for workload peaks, for particularly demanding matters, or where they held specialist knowledge that could not be replaced. They bore the full risk of receiving no instructions, but in return they had to maintain no infrastructure. They, too, typically had no direct client contact.

This structure rested on one tacit premise: processing capacity is scarce and expensive. That is precisely the premise AI removes.

The single shift that explains everything

If the same work — claim drafting, the specification, prior-art searching, responding to office actions — can be done roughly five times faster, then the locus of value shifts. It moves away from execution and toward what machines (still) cannot do: client trust, strategic judgment, and personal accountability for the outcome.

From this follows a second, less obvious point — the question of who captures the efficiency gain. In the short term it is the partners: their costs fall while their prices to clients hold at the old level, and the margin widens. In the long term, however, competition passes the saving on to clients, because many attorneys can suddenly do far more work and compete for the same — not equally growing — demand. The transition from “short term” to “long term” is the real fault line, and each of the three groups experiences it differently.

1. Partners: short-term winners, under reform pressure in the long run

In the short term, partners are the clear beneficiaries. They own the one resource AI does not replicate — the client relationship — while their cost base falls: the same volume of work now requires fewer associate hours and less bought-in freelance capacity. As long as fees to clients still track the old levels, the margin expands.

In the long term, the picture reverses. Three forces bear down on partners:

First, price erosion. Competition transfers the efficiency gains to clients; revenue per matter falls. To hold their income, partners need either more matters or higher-value work.

Second, the loss of the infrastructure advantage. The classic lever of large firms was the pyramid: many associates whose hours the partner re-billed at a mark-up. Once AI takes over execution, this leverage shrinks — and with it the structural head-start that size once provided. A lean unit with AI can suddenly deliver quality that used to require a whole team.

Third, the threat of disintermediation. As soon as clients — especially large, patent-savvy corporations — deploy AI tools themselves, partners face a justification test: what exactly is the client still paying for? The answer can no longer be “capacity.”

Strategies for partners:

  • Move up the value chain. Portfolio strategy, freedom-to-operate analyses, licensing, opposition and infringement strategy, and translating imprecise invention disclosures into robust claims all remain judgment work. The partner as a provider of capacity loses; the partner as a strategic adviser and risk-bearer wins.
  • Reshape the pyramid into a diamond. Fewer pure-execution associates, more AI plus experienced judgment. Anyone who preserves the old leverage economics is funding structures the market no longer supports.
  • Productise the offering. Fixed-fee packages, subscription models and technology-enabled services replace the eroding hourly model for text production.
  • Own the AI layer. A firm that builds its own tools, prompts, review routines and quality assurance as a firm asset turns AI into an asset rather than a threat.
  • Open the market downward. Efficiency makes it possible to serve clients who previously failed on cost — SMEs, start-ups, individual inventors. If the price per matter falls, the number of matters can rise (a kind of Jevons effect for the patent profession). Falling total costs of a filing can generate additional demand — though this is capped by the rigid block of official fees, as described in the cost post.

2. Associates: the most exposed group

No role profile maps as precisely onto what AI does best as that of the associate: allocated execution work, billed to the partner. It is exactly this work that is being automated.

In the short term, the group splits in two. Those who master AI and become five times more productive themselves are more valuable than ever. Those who do not become dispensable. Hiring cools, because the leverage economics that once funded associate salaries yield fewer profitable hours.

A problem lurks here that reaches beyond the individual firm: the hollowed-out middle. Junior attorneys traditionally learn judgment on the simple work — the search, the first draft claim set, the routine office-action response. If AI takes over precisely this learning curve, the question becomes where tomorrow’s senior competence is supposed to come from. The profession risks cutting the training pipeline that feeds its future partners.

In the long term, the path to partnership narrows — fewer partners are needed, and the economics that funded that ascent are weaker. For the associate, two very different futures open up: the rise to AI-augmented senior who supervises, reviews and eventually holds relationships — or displacement toward freelancing. The associate who only executes has no future. The associate who builds judgment, client proximity, specialisation and AI mastery does.

Strategies for associates:

  • Become AI-fluent, fast. The decisive question is not whether AI does the work, but whether you are the one who does five times as much with it — or the one it replaces.
  • Break the “no client contact” rule. Building relationship and business-development skills early means acquiring exactly the resource that is scarce and valuable in the new environment.
  • Specialise deeply — in technology fields, procedures (such as opposition and nullity), or industries where judgment and experience command a premium and standardisation reaches its limits.
  • Occupy the “human in the loop” role. Quality assurance, sense-checking and responsibility for machine-generated drafts become a distinct, liability-relevant service in their own right.
  • Build a personal reputation that does not depend on the firm alone — through publications, talks, and visibility.
  • Think entrepreneurially. Because AI lowers the need for infrastructure, a capable associate can today set up a lean practice of their own with far less overhead than only a few years ago.

3. Freelance patent attorneys: structurally the biggest opportunity — and the biggest risk

Freelancers sit at the most interesting break point. Their classic reasons for being engaged — workload peaks and volume — partly dissolve, because partners can now absorb peaks with AI themselves. The “buffer for capacity spikes” is needed less.

In the short term, generalist freelancers therefore lose their overflow work. Specialists with irreplaceable knowledge keep their niche, at least initially.

At the same time, freelancers structurally have the best cost base of all: no infrastructure, no overhead, no administrative apparatus — and, with AI, enormous productivity. In a market of falling prices, the lowest-cost provider has the advantage. What they lack is precisely the most valuable thing: their own client access and a brand, the trust.

In the long term, that very question decides whether freelancers end up among the big winners or the big losers:

As winners, the free, AI-native patent attorney is the leanest conceivable unit — low fixed costs, high throughput, ideally positioned for a price-sensitive segment (start-ups, SMEs, individual inventors). They can significantly undercut established structures on price.

As losers, those who compete only as cheap execution capacity are finished — because there the AI itself is cheaper still. The pure commodity freelancer is ground down between the machine (all but free) and the firm (with its relationships).

Strategies for freelancers:

  • Occupy niches AI does not cover — cutting-edge technology, rare language or jurisdiction combinations, deep sector expertise, forensically demanding disputes.
  • Move from subcontractor to independent practitioner. AI removes the infrastructure barrier that once forced the freelancer into dependence on the firm. Building one’s own client relationships is the decisive step toward the micro-firm.
  • Network. Loose alliances and cooperatives can offer firm-like reliability without carrying the overhead of a classic firm.
  • Shift the offering — away from pure execution and toward AI-assisted senior review and second opinions that firms, too, will buy in.
  • Get ahead of disintermediation by the machine by offering precisely the responsibility, judgment and accountability that an AI cannot assume.

The common movement: all three roles converge on the same scarce competence

What is striking is that AI ultimately pushes all three groups in the same direction. The infrastructure advantage that separated the partner from the freelancer loses its significance. The execution capacity that associates and freelancers contributed becomes a commodity. What remains in the end and makes the difference is the same for all three: client trust, strategic judgment, and personal accountability.

For one constant endures: the patent attorney signs, takes responsibility, and is liable. That accountability cannot be delegated to a machine — it is the profession’s most durable human “moat.” Whoever combines it with genuine judgment and a resilient relationship survives the upheaval. Whoever sells only capacity will not.

Takeaways for IP practice

  • Your role, not your title, determines your exposure. Partners are short-term winners and under long-term reform pressure; associates are the most exposed; freelancers have both the greatest opportunity and the greatest risk.
  • Value migrates from execution to judgment. Each of the three groups should shift its time to where the machine cannot reach: strategy, the client relationship, responsibility.
  • AI competence is not an add-on but the entry ticket. The dividing line will run between those who do five times the work with AI and those it replaces.
  • The training question is strategic. If AI takes over the juniors’ learning curve, competence-building has to be reorganised — otherwise the profession will, a decade from now, lack the next generation of judgment.
  • The market can open downward. Falling costs can unlock new clients; the limiting factor remains the rigid block of official fees.

AI changes not only how much work is done in the patent profession, but who is paid for it and for what. The firm structure of partners, associates and freelancers was an answer to the scarcity of processing capacity. Once that scarcity is gone, the structure reorders itself — along the only resource that stays scarce: human trust and judgment.

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When the Patent Office Costs More Than the Attorney: Two Scenarios for the Future of the IP Industry in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Posted on July 2, 2026 by Dr. Dirk Franke

The Quiet Reversal of the Cost Structure

For decades, an unspoken rule of thumb governed the patent world: the office is cheap, the attorney is expensive. Anyone looking to reduce the cost of a patent filing turned the attorney screw — shorter specifications, leaner searches, more input from the inventor.

At the European Patent Office (EPO), that rule of thumb has long since ceased to apply. Official fees have overtaken attorney drafting fees. A European proceeding now costs more in pure official fees than the drafting of the application itself — and the gap is widening.

It is precisely this reversal that sets up the question set to reshape the IP industry in the coming years: What happens when Artificial Intelligence drastically reduces one side of the cost equation — and not the other?

The Cost Comparison in Numbers

Consider a typical constellation: entry into the European phase (or a direct filing) with 20 patent claims, pursued through the 5th renewal year. The figures are based on the EPO schedule of fees as in force from 1 April 2026.

EPO Official Fees

ItemAmount
Filing fee (online)€135
European search fee€1,595
Designation fee€720
Examination fee€2,010
Claims fees (claims 16–20: 5 × €290)€1,450
Subtotal — entry/examination≈ €5,910
3rd year renewal fee≈ €690
4th year renewal fee≈ €845
5th year renewal fee≈ €1,000
Subtotal — renewal fees (years 3–5)≈ €2,535
Total EPO official fees≈ €8,445

Note: Renewal fees at the application stage follow the applicable schedule of fees; the 3rd and 4th year renewals were raised above average with effect from 1 April 2026. The figures above are rounded to this order of magnitude.

Attorney Drafting

ItemAmount
Drafting and filing of the application€3,000 – €5,000

The result is striking and, for many clients, counterintuitive: even today — without any AI — the pure EPO official fees in this model case, at roughly €8,400, sit well above the attorney drafting fee of €3,000 to €5,000. The office has become the larger cost block, not the attorney.

This figure is the lever on which everything that follows turns. Because AI initially acts on only one of the two sides — the attorney’s.

Scenario 1: The Attorney Becomes Cheap, the Office Stays Rigid

AI-supported tools for claim drafting, specification generation, and prior-art search substantially reduce the attorney workload per application. The drafting fee — already the smaller item — falls further, to a fraction of its former level.

On the office side, in this scenario, nothing happens.

That is not an unrealistic assumption; it follows institutional logic. The EPO is a monopolist without competitive pressure. It pursues its own objectives, which are not aligned with the cost interests of applicants — among them safeguarding the employment and continued standing of a large examiner workforce. An authority with this incentive structure does not necessarily pass on AI-driven efficiency gains in the form of lower fees; it may just as readily channel them into institutional preservation, reserves, or political latitude. The most recent fee round — an increase in most core fees from 1 April 2026, with above-average rises in the early renewal fees — points to a rigid, upward-tending fee regime rather than to any pass-through of efficiency gains.

The consequences for firms:

If value creation per mandate shrinks on the attorney side, but overall demand for IP rights does not grow to the same degree, a displacement dynamic sets in. The same work is done by fewer people in less time. The number of mandates a single attorney can handle rises — the total number of mandates awarded does not.

The result is a market in which more and more attorneys compete for fewer and fewer economically viable mandates. The price of legal work falls, margins erode, and the efficiency gains from AI accrue not to the profession but are passed through to clients under competitive pressure. The office’s rigid cost block, meanwhile, prevents falling attorney costs from pushing the total cost of a filing low enough to noticeably stimulate demand. The office remains the bottleneck — and firms bear the adjustment burden alone.

In this scenario, AI is not a growth driver for firms but an accelerant of consolidation.

Scenario 2: Both Sides Give Way — The Filing-and-Grant Machine

The second scenario rests on a bolder assumption: the office, too, opens up to AI and passes on the efficiency gains. This becomes possible because here AI is not merely cheaper, but simultaneously better.

The decisive technical point is search. A near-perfect, machine-driven search for novelty-destroying prior art — across all languages, databases, and document classes — reduces the cost of the most labour-intensive part of examination while at the same time raising its quality. For the first time, cost reduction and quality improvement coincide rather than pulling against each other.

If both cost sides — attorney and office — fall at once, the entire economic calculus of the patent system tips over. Protecting even the smallest improvements becomes financeable. The number of new filings can rise dramatically.

At the end of this trajectory stands an industry that transforms into a filing-and-grant machine: applications are generated by machine, searched by machine, examined by machine, and granted by machine — a procedure that, in routine operation, no longer requires any human interaction. The inventor supplies the core technical information; everything downstream runs automatically.

Litigation, too, becomes a machine matter.

Automation does not stop at grant. In opposition and revocation proceedings, the intensive search for novelty-destroying prior art is the core of every dispute — and this is exactly where AI is strongest. What today ties up weeks of attorney and office work becomes a fast, exhaustive machine search.

A two-tier model becomes conceivable:

  • First instance by AI: The decision on whether a patent is maintained is taken, at first instance, by an AI system — fast, cheap, and based on an exhaustive search.
  • Second instance by humans: Review remains reserved to human examiners — but at significantly higher cost. The human eye shifts from being the standard to being an expensive remedy.

This structure would have far-reaching consequences for access to justice. The cheap, automated first instance lowers the threshold for challenges to IP rights; the expensive human second instance becomes a filter affordable only to those with enough at stake. Whoever wants human review pays for it — a pay-for-human model at the heart of the sovereign procedure.

The Real Fork in the Road

Both scenarios share the same starting diagnosis — the reversal of the cost structure in the office’s favour — and diverge on a single question: Does the EPO give way, or not?

  • If the office stays rigid (Scenario 1), the full force of AI concentrates on the attorney side. Firms consolidate, competition intensifies, and clients benefit only to a limited degree, because the official cost block caps the total saving.
  • If the office gives way (Scenario 2), a largely dehumanised filing-and-grant apparatus emerges, with sharply rising filing numbers — bringing with it all the follow-on problems of quality assurance, a flood of prior art, and the delicate transition to machine-made legal decisions.

Institutional economics argues, in the short term, for Scenario 1. A monopolist without competitive pressure and with its own preservation interests has little incentive to translate efficiency gains into fee reductions. Technical development — particularly the quality of machine search — drives, by contrast, towards Scenario 2.

The likely path lies somewhere in between: the attorney side automates and consolidates first (Scenario 1 is already underway), while the office side follows more slowly, under political pressure, and in stages. The transition to a fully automated procedure would then be no single leap, but a years-long contest over the question of where in the procedure the human remains indispensable — and who pays for them.

What This Means for Applicants and Firms Today

For clients, the decisive cost question shifts. No longer “Which attorney is cheap?”, but “How do I manage the official cost block?” becomes the central strategic task — through the number of claims, the timing of payments, geographic reach, and the question of which rights are even worth maintaining.

For firms, the answer lies not in clinging to the hourly model for text production, which AI is eroding in any case, but in shifting towards what machines cannot (yet) deliver: strategic counsel, the translation of imprecise invention disclosures into robust claims, responsibility and liability for content — and the human second instance that, in Scenario 2, becomes the most valuable asset of all.

The reversal of the cost structure is already reality. Which of the two scenarios follows from it will be decided not in the firms — but on the question of how a monopolistic office deals with the very technology that calls its own cost base into question.

This article is provided for information and discussion and does not constitute legal advice. The fees stated refer to the EPO schedule of fees as adjusted with effect from 1 April 2026.

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Can a Research Hub Be Rescued on Credit? Debt, Taxes and Red Tape from a Startup Perspective

Posted on July 2, 2026 by Dr. Dirk Franke

A follow-up to “Is Germany Falling Behind? What 125 Years of Nobel Prizes Reveal About Its Research Landscape“

The previous article closed with a finding that can be summed up in a single sentence: Germany is not losing ground because it does too little research, but because others scale faster, bigger and more deliberately — and because the path from an idea to a granted IP right is too long here. That leads almost inevitably to the economic-policy question now under intense debate: can the gap be closed with money? Specifically — can Germany strengthen its position as a research hub by taking on new debt and investing massively in research and development? And how does that relate to the parallel debates over higher taxes and levies, over bureaucracy, and over the conditions for new company formation?

For a startup, this is no academic question. Where research is done and financed, the inventions arise that become tomorrow’s patents and marketable products. We work through the debate along four questions and close with a conclusion for IP practice.

1. The fiscal headroom: how much “reserve” is there in the first place?

First, the good news for anyone counting on debt-financed investment. Measured by the internationally comparable Maastricht definition, Germany’s debt-to-GDP ratio stood at 63.5 percent in 2025 — around €2.84 trillion. That is comfortable in the EU context: the EU average rose to 81.7 percent in 2025, France stood at 115.6 percent, Italy at 137.1 percent and Greece at 146.1 percent. Only a handful of states, such as Estonia (24.1 percent), are better positioned than Germany. Germany’s top rating and low refinancing costs confirm this headroom — while France, for instance, was downgraded in September 2025 and pays markedly higher interest.

That reserve is, however, being deployed at high speed. With the constitutional amendment of March 2025, Germany’s Schuldenbremse (constitutional debt brake) was opened up in two areas: defence spending above a threshold was largely exempted from the borrowing limit, and a credit-financed “infrastructure special fund” (Sondervermögen) of €500 billion in total was created (€300 billion for the federal government, €100 billion for the states and municipalities, €100 billion for the Climate and Transformation Fund). It is important not to misread the label: these special funds are genuine debt and are counted in the official ratio — they are “assets” in name only. Projections see the debt ratio climbing to somewhere between 70 and over 100 percent in the coming years, depending on growth and inflation.

Two things follow for the research hub. First, fiscal room for additional investment does exist and is tolerated by the capital markets. Second, it is finite, already largely earmarked for defence and infrastructure, and the real long-term liabilities — pensions and civil-servant retirement obligations — loom as implicit commitments that are not even captured in the official ratio. Anyone wishing to fund the research hub with new borrowing is therefore competing with other claims for a limited and shrinking buffer.

2. Money is rarely the real bottleneck

The central insight of the Nobel Prize article was that Germany does not fail on research intensity. The latest figures bear this out: in 2024, spending on research and development rose to €137.1 billion, a share of 3.17 percent of GDP and thus the highest reading since the series began in 1995. Among the large EU economies Germany is out in front, comfortably clearing the European three-percent target.

The national target of 3.5 percent was missed by 2025 and pushed back to 2030 by the federal and state governments in December 2025 — but the decisive point lies elsewhere: roughly two thirds of R&D spending (about €92.5 billion in 2024) is borne by the private sector, not the state. The 3.5-percent target is simply unreachable without private investment. Additional public debt can therefore make a contribution — for computing infrastructure, non-university top-tier research, or equity capital — but it does not replace corporate innovation budgets, and it does not address the structural weaknesses: bureaucracy, the translation gap, skilled labour, economies of scale.

The direction of travel is the real warning sign. While real R&D spending in the United States grew in 2024, in Germany it slipped slightly. A public investment programme can cushion this trend — but only if it actually flows into productive, location-strengthening uses rather than into consumptive spending that burdens debt sustainability without raising innovative capacity. Debt is a lever, not an end in itself; its effect on the research hub depends entirely on what it is spent on.

3. Taxes and levies: the underrated location factor

If money is not the bottleneck, the framework conditions move to the fore — and here Germany fares poorly by international comparison. The tax-and-contribution ratio (taxes and social contributions relative to GDP) hit a historic high of around 42 percent in 2025. On corporate taxation, the headline combined burden on corporations exceeds 30 percent, against an OECD average of about 24 percent and an EU average of roughly 21 percent; the effective rate is just under 27 percent. In the Tax Foundation’s 2025 International Tax Competitiveness Index, Germany ranks 20th of 38 OECD countries and has the fourth-highest corporate tax rate. The burden on labour is high too: the top rate of income tax reaches 47.5 percent including the solidarity surcharge, and the tax wedge on labour is the second-highest in the OECD after Belgium.

For research-intensive startups this matters twice over. On the one hand, high non-wage labour costs make precisely those highly qualified positions expensive that form the core of a deep-tech or biotech team. On the other, the taxation of equity stakes and exits helps determine whether internationally mobile founders and investors choose the location at all.

Policymakers have recognised the need to act. For the years 2025 to 2027, an “investment booster” was adopted, offering 30 percent declining-balance depreciation on equipment investments; from 2028, the Körperschaftsteuer (corporate income tax) is to fall in five annual steps from 15 to 10 percent. Whether these reliefs are sufficient and arrive in time is an open question — but the direction is right. In fairness, it should be noted that the high tax-and-contribution ratio also finances a capable system of public goods, and that the effective burden on investment sits below the headline rate thanks to generous depreciation rules. For the location decision of a mobile founder, however, what counts is the overall signal — and at present that signal is unfavourable.

4. Do debates about higher taxes harm the research hub?

This is precisely where the political controversy sits. Alongside the relief plans, there are proposals for higher burdens — for instance to tighten the Erbschaftsteuer (inheritance and gift tax) or to reintroduce a wealth tax. Proponents argue on grounds of distributional fairness and of the state’s financing needs in an ageing society. The other side — including business associations and family-owned firms — warns that tightening inheritance tax would considerably complicate succession in mid-sized companies and thereby endanger long-established structures.

For the research hub and for startups, the effect of such debates is ambivalent, and it deserves a sober look. What matters economically is less the individual measure than the expectations effect: location decisions, company formations and growth financing are long-term and react sensitively to uncertainty about the future tax burden. When higher taxation of capital, wealth or exits is discussed without a clear framework in sight, the uncertainty alone can make investors more cautious and deter internationally mobile founders — precisely in an environment where competition for talent and venture capital is fierce and where Germany already lags on the availability of capital (see Section 6).

At the same time, it would be simplistic to dismiss every tax increase as damaging to the location per se. What is decisive is the concrete design: a measure that burdens broad incomes and dampens work incentives operates differently from a targeted rule with reliable exemptions for entrepreneurial capital. From the specific vantage point of innovative startups, though, the finding can be stated clearly: what these companies need most is predictability and a competitive treatment of equity participation and exits. Debates that undermine that predictability are riskier for the research and founding hub than their fiscal revenue would justify — regardless of how one assesses them on distributional grounds.

5. Bureaucracy and barriers to founding

The Nobel Prize article named bureaucracy and slow procedures as a structural weakness of the location. For new companies this is felt directly: drawn-out formation and permitting processes, burdensome reporting and documentation duties, a tax code whose complexity overwhelms small teams, and cumbersome immigration procedures for international skilled workers. Every hour a founding team spends on administration rather than product development lengthens the path to its first protectable invention.

Especially critical is the much-cited translation gap — the transition from basic research to a marketable, patentable application. It is not merely a matter of money but also of process: university spin-offs frequently founder on unclear rules governing intellectual property, on slow equity decisions by the institutions, and on missing structures for technology transfer. Cutting red tape is therefore no sideshow but one of the most effective and, at the same time, most budget-friendly levers — unlike additional debt, it costs the state nothing and improves conditions immediately.

6. What startups need from the state

Distilling the perspective of innovative startups yields a list of priorities that only partly concerns money:

Venture capital in the growth phase. Germany’s financing gap is structural: measured against GDP, Germany has recently invested a fraction of what flows into US startups, and the market has historically been bank-financed rather than equity-oriented. The WIN initiative (Growth and Innovation Capital for Germany), launched in 2024, aims to mobilise €12 billion by 2030 initially — and, under the 2025 coalition’s plans, more than €25 billion; by the end of 2025, around €2.64 billion had been committed. Flanking this, a reform of the investment ordinance (Anlageverordnung) in early 2025 widened the scope for insurers and pension funds to hold risk capital. Here the state is on the right track but must deliver — early voices are already warning that the initiative is running out of steam.

Non-dilutive innovation funding. The Forschungszulage (Germany’s statutory research and development tax allowance) is perhaps the most underrated lever. Since its introduction in 2020, and following expansions through the Growth Opportunities Act (Wachstumschancengesetz, 2024) and the tax investment programme (2025), it supports research-active companies with — for SMEs — 35 percent on an assessment base of up to €12 million per year, i.e. a maximum of roughly €4.2 million. It is a legal entitlement rather than a competitive procedure, is paid out in cash where there is no tax liability, and does not dilute equity. For young, still loss-making companies, that is cash on the cost side — and the underlying project scoping simultaneously creates substance in investor due diligence.

Predictable, competitive taxation — in particular of employee equity participation and exits (see Section 4).

Lean procedures and a genuine welcome culture for international top talent, faster spin-offs, functioning technology transfer, and the closing of the translation gap (see Section 5).

The ordering is telling: of these four points, only the first is primarily a question of money — and even there it is less about state debt than about mobilising private capital. The other three are matters of reform, not of spending.

7. Conclusion for IP practice

The answer to the opening question is therefore this: more debt and more R&D spending can support the research hub, but they are neither sufficient nor the most effective lever. In Germany, money is rarely the bottleneck; speed, the tax burden, the availability of capital in the growth phase, and the procedures at the interface between research and commercialisation are. A debt-financed investment programme delivers only when accompanied by structural reform — otherwise it consumes a limited fiscal buffer without raising innovative capacity.

For clients and IP strategists, this yields concrete points of connection:

  • The research allowance belongs in every financing architecture. Any company conducting R&D should assess and document eligibility early — the clean project and invention scoping this requires is in any case the foundation of a robust patent strategy.
  • IP rights are a financing argument. In a capital-scarce environment, a well-conceived IP portfolio is a central value driver in due diligence and a signal to investors — precisely where venture capital is tight.
  • The translation gap is also an IP gap. Whether excellent basic research becomes protectable, marketable inventions is decided at exactly the interface between science, commercialisation and industrial property protection — the interface at which early, strategic IP advice takes hold.

Germany has the research base, the capital potential and — contrary to what is often claimed — fiscal headroom too. Whether the next generation of breakthroughs carries a German label depends less on how much additional money flows into the location than on how quickly the framework conditions are reformed — and on how swiftly an idea becomes a granted right.

Data sources: Deutsche Bundesbank (public debt 2025); Federal Statistical Office / Eurostat (debt and deficit in EU comparison 2025; R&D spending 2024); Federal Ministry of Finance (debt brake, international tax comparison, WIN initiative); GWK (the 3.5% R&D target); German Economic Institute (IW) / INSM (corporate taxation 2025/26); ZEW (effective corporate tax burden); Tax Foundation / Statista (International Tax Competitiveness Index 2025; corporate tax reform); KfW (WIN annual report 2025); Federal Ministry of Education and Research / BSFZ (research allowance); Stiftung Marktwirtschaft (implicit public debt, generational accounting 2025). As of: July 2026.

Photo: © Tim Reckmann, [CC BY 2.0]

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Is Germany Falling Behind? What 125 Years of Nobel Prizes Reveal About Its Standing as a Research Location

Posted on June 30, 2026 by Dr. Dirk Franke

In this article we analyse the Nobel Prizes awarded in Physics and Chemistry between 1901 and 2025 for Germany, the United Kingdom, France and the USA, and place the development in the broader context of research spending, patent activity and locational policy. From the perspective of a start-up company, the question is not academic: where scientific breakthroughs occur, tomorrow’s intellectual property rights — and the economic value created from them — arise.

1. Historical development, 1901 to 2025

The chart below shows the cumulative number of Nobel laureates in Physics and Chemistry, assigned to the country of the laureate’s academic affiliation at the time of the award. Three phases can be distinguished.

Figure 1: Cumulative Nobel laureates in Physics and Chemistry, 1901–2025 (affiliation basis). Source: nobelprize.org, own calculation.

First phase (1901 to about 1930): During the first three decades, Germany was the undisputed centre of the natural sciences. By around 1930, Germany had already accumulated some two dozen laureates, while the USA stood at a handful. The United Kingdom followed as a steady number two; France began strongly with the Curies and Becquerel, but then remained at a low level for a long time.

Second phase (1933 to 1945): With the expulsion and emigration of numerous scientists from 1933 onwards, the German curve flattens noticeably. Researchers such as Hans Bethe, Maria Goeppert-Mayer and Otto Stern won their awards only later — and already as scientists in the USA. The loss of personnel in those years still has an effect today.

Third phase (from about 1960): Around 1961 the USA overtakes Germany and then rises almost unchecked. As of the 2025 cut-off date, the final standing is as follows:

CountryPhysicsChemistryTotal
USA11085195
United Kingdom263056
Germany223355
France15924

It is notable that Germany has maintained its tradition better in Chemistry (33 laureates) than in Physics (22), where the gap to the USA is particularly wide. Overall, with almost 200 laureates, the USA stands around three and a half times as high as Germany.

Methodological note: The assignment follows the affiliation as stated by the Nobel Foundation, i.e. the country in which the laureate was working at the time of the award. A count by country of birth would be higher for Germany and lower for the USA — precisely because of the wave of emigration. The 2026 prizes will not be announced until October 2026; the data reflect awards through 2025. Source: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences / nobelprize.org.

2. The record of the last 20 years

Because Nobel Prizes honour work that often dates back decades, it is worth looking at the most recent window. In the years 2006 to 2025 too, the gap has not narrowed but solidified:

CountryPhysicsChemistryTotal 2006–2025
USA253156
United Kingdom5510
Germany448
France415

In this period, the USA produced about seven times as many laureates as Germany. There were certainly German successes — Gerhard Ertl (Chemistry 2007), Stefan Hell (2014), Benjamin List (2021), Reinhard Genzel and Klaus Hasselmann (Physics 2020/2021) and Ferenc Krausz (2023) — but they remained isolated cases in a field dominated by US institutions. Tellingly, several of these prizes went to Max Planck Institutes: Germany’s leading research is concentrated in a few non-university flagships.

3. Research spending: USA and Germany compared

In absolute terms: a factor of around six

The most obvious explanation is research spending. According to estimates by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO, purchasing-power-adjusted, base year 2015), in 2024 the USA invested around USD 782 billion in research and development — Germany around USD 132 billion. The OECD even puts US spending at the one-trillion-dollar mark in 2024 prices; only China is now on a par. In absolute terms, the USA therefore spends about six times as much on research and development as Germany.

Relative to population: ahead per capita as well

This factor of six could be explained in part by size: with around 340 million inhabitants, the USA has roughly four times as many people as Germany (about 84 million). The spending lead (≈ 6:1), however, exceeds the population lead (≈ 4:1). This means that the USA invests more even per capita. US per-capita spending in 2023 was around USD 2,850 (purchasing-power-adjusted); for Germany the figure works out at roughly USD 2,000 — so the USA is about a third higher per head.

Measured against economic output, Germany is almost level

If research intensity is measured as a share of gross domestic product, the gap shrinks considerably: in 2023/24 the USA reached around 3.45 per cent, Germany 3.11 to 3.14 per cent. Germany thus still belongs to the world’s leading group and ranks ahead among the large EU economies. The problem therefore lies less in the ratio than in the absolute scale and in structural factors — and increasingly in the direction of travel: in 2024, real research spending grew by 3.4 per cent in the USA, while it fell by 0.4 per cent in Germany. The gap is thus widening further.

4. The patent picture

For an IP location, patent statistics are informative, as they capture applied innovative strength more directly than the Nobel Prize. Here a more nuanced picture emerges.

In international PCT applications, Germany ranked fifth worldwide in 2024 with 16,721 filings — behind China (70,160), the USA (54,087), Japan (48,397) and South Korea (23,851; WIPO PCT Yearly Review 2025). In absolute terms, the USA files a good three times as many international patents as Germany. Per capita, however, the picture reverses: per million inhabitants, Germany reaches around 200 PCT applications, the USA only about 158. In applied, SME-driven engineering innovation — mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, drive technology, energy — Germany remains a patent powerhouse.

In research-intensive future fields, however, the warning signs are mounting:

  • Pharmaceuticals: In 2000, more than 1,400 applications (around 17 per cent of the global sector) still came from Germany; by 2021 this figure had fallen to around 849 (German Economic Institute, IW).
  • Clinical trials: In the number of clinical trials run by pharmaceutical companies, Germany slipped from second place (2016) to fourth — behind the USA, China and Spain.
  • Translation gap: The path from basic research to marketable, protectable products is regarded as a chronic weakness of the location.

Germany thus defends its position where it has traditionally been strong, but is losing ground in precisely those fields where the scientific and economic returns of the future arise — and where the next Nobel Prizes will be awarded.

5. Structural causes

Why, despite a high research ratio, does Germany fail to close the gap with the world’s leaders? The Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation (EFI), together with position papers by the Stifterverband, the Leopoldina and the Volkswagen Foundation, identify a structural rather than a cyclical problem:

  • Bureaucracy and administrative burden. Cumbersome, slow approval and immigration procedures deter international top talent.
  • Talent balance at the top end. Germany has recently recorded a net inflow of researchers; the scientists who leave, however, are on average more prolific in publications than those newly arriving.
  • Demographics. Like the economy as a whole, the science system is affected by ageing-related personnel shortages and is increasingly dependent on immigration.
  • Economies of scale and magnetism. Leading US universities and companies concentrate money, talent and venture capital at a self-reinforcing density: excellence attracts excellence.
  • Infrastructure for future technologies. According to the European Commission, the entire EU has less than 5 per cent of the world’s AI computing capacity — the USA around 75 per cent, China 15 per cent (German Bundestag, printed paper 21/3357, 2025).

6. Outlook: trend and forecast

Risk scenario

If the current path continues, the gap to the USA is likely to widen further. The indicators: falling real research spending in 2024, a clear lag in AI computing capacity, the retreat from pharmaceutical frontier research and a demographically driven worsening of the skills shortage. With the Nobel Prize, which rewards breakthroughs with decades of lead time, this weakness will only fully show in the 2040s — but the seeds are being sown today. The most likely forecast: Germany continues to fall behind at the scientific frontier.

Opportunity scenario

At the same time, US research budgets are coming under pressure under the second Trump administration. German voices see this as an opportunity to attract top researchers to Europe. There are also real strengths that often get lost in the crisis rhetoric: in the Nature Index 2025, Germany ranks third worldwide behind China and the USA, and first in Europe; the research landscape (Max Planck, Fraunhofer, Helmholtz, Leibniz) is highly differentiated, and research intensity, at over 3 per cent of GDP, is in the upper field of industrialised nations. Whether Germany seizes this opportunity depends less on money than on the speed of reform: leaner bureaucracy, a genuine culture of welcome with financial incentives for top talent, investment in computing infrastructure, more venture capital and the closing of the translation gap.

7. Conclusion for IP practice

The 125-year Nobel record is a lagging indicator of the shift in scientific gravity. Germany has lost its former leading role to the USA and has been unable to narrow the gap over the past two decades either — if anything, the gap is still widening. For clients and IP strategists, this means:

  • Frontier research is shifting. Anyone seeking to build IP rights in key technologies (AI, biotechnology, quantum, semiconductors) must keep an eye on the US and Chinese markets and their filing dynamics.
  • Germany’s strength remains applied innovation. In SME-driven engineering innovation, Germany’s per-capita patent density is world-leading — and for many clients that is where the greatest value lies.
  • Locational competition is becoming tougher. Structural weaknesses — bureaucracy, the translation gap, infrastructure — determine whether excellent basic research becomes protectable, marketable inventions.

Germany is not falling behind because it does too little research, but because others scale faster, larger and more purposefully — and because the path from idea to IP right is too long here. It is precisely at this interface between research and industrial property rights that it will be decided whether the next generation of breakthroughs bears a German return address.

Data sources: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences / nobelprize.org; OECD Main Science and Technology Indicators (2026); WIPO Global Innovation Index (2025) and PCT Yearly Review (2025); Eurostat (2024); SSTI (2025); Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation; Stifterverband / Leopoldina / Volkswagen Foundation (2025); German Bundestag, printed paper 21/3357 (2025); Nature Index (2025). Own calculations for the cumulative Nobel count (affiliation basis).

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Changing the Name of an IP Rights Holder or Applicant

Posted on June 29, 2026 by Dr. Dirk Franke
European Patent Office

Company names change, individuals marry, corporate structures are reorganised. Whenever the holder or applicant of an IP right is affected, the relevant register should be updated promptly. This article summarises what to bear in mind when recording a name change before the EUIPO, the European Patent Office (EPO) and the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA).

1. The decisive preliminary question: name change or transfer of rights?

Every request begins with the correct legal characterisation of the event. It governs the procedure, the evidence required and the costs:

  • Pure name change: The identity of the legal entity is preserved – only its designation changes. Typical cases are the renaming of a company, the change of name of a natural person (for instance through marriage) or, depending on the applicable national law, a mere change of legal form without loss of identity.
  • Transfer of rights (recordal of a change of ownership): The holder changes; the right passes to a different legal entity. This includes sales, asset deals and, as a rule, mergers in which the transferring entity loses its identity.

Whether an event qualifies as a name change or as a transfer of rights depends on the applicable national law – the decisive factor is whether the identity of the legal entity continues to exist. A wrong characterisation regularly leads to objections and delays. In case of doubt, careful review against the register documents (e.g. the commercial register) is advisable, because transfers are subject to different and usually stricter requirements.

This article focuses on the pure name change; the differing requirements for a transfer of rights are mentioned in each case for the purpose of distinction.

2. EUIPO – EU trade marks and EU designs

Formal requirements. As long as the identity of the holder or applicant remains unaffected, the name and address can be changed freely. The easiest way is to make the change online via the User Area of one’s account or via the corresponding online form for other recordals. The request must be filed in one of the EUIPO’s five languages; where the official form is used, completing the text fields in one of those languages is sufficient.

Evidence. For a pure name or address change, the EUIPO generally does not require any supporting documents. Notifying the new name is usually enough. Only in cases of doubt (for instance as to legal form) may the Office request evidence.

A practical advantage – the ID number. If the holder states the identification number assigned by the EUIPO, the change is carried out automatically for all IP rights held under that ID. A list of all affected trade marks and designs is then not required.

Official fees. A pure name and address change is free of charge. By contrast, a full transfer of rights is the exception for which a fee is charged (whereas a partial transfer is free of charge).

Distinction from a transfer. If the identity of the legal entity changes – for example in a merger – the appropriate request is not for a name change but for the recordal of a transfer.

3. EPO – European patent applications and patents

Entries in the European Patent Register are governed generally by Rule 143 EPC. As regards names, three scenarios must be distinguished:

a) Pure name change (identity preserved). This is recorded in the register upon request. The EPO requires suitable evidence for this purpose, for example an extract from the commercial register; where appropriate, it will request a translation into one of its official languages (cf. Guidelines for Examination, Part E, Chapter XII). No official fee is payable for a pure name change.

b) Correction of an incorrect applicant name. Where the incorrect designation is based on an error (e.g. a typing error or the inadvertent naming of a subsidiary), a correction under Rule 139 EPC may be available. It takes effect retroactively but is subject to a higher evidentiary burden and must be requested without undue delay after the error is discovered.

c) Transfer of rights. A genuine change of ownership is recorded under Rule 22 EPC. Evidence in the form of an assignment satisfying the requirements of Article 72 EPC (written form, signatures of both parties) is required. The transfer takes effect vis-à-vis the EPO only once the documents have been produced.

Form of filing. Requests may be filed in writing via MyEPO or using EPO Form 5050 and must be signed by an entitled person.

Official fees – a current point to note. For a transfer under Rule 22 EPC an administrative fee (most recently EUR 120) was previously payable. Since 1 April 2024, however, this fee has been waived for recordal requests filed via the MyEPO system. A pure name change was, and remains, free of charge.

Competence after grant. For granted European patents, the EPO is competent to make entries only during the nine-month opposition period or while opposition proceedings are pending (Rule 85 in conjunction with Rule 22 EPC). Thereafter, changes must be requested in the national registers of the validated states. For a European patent with unitary effect (Unitary Patent), the entry is made in the Register for Unitary Patent Protection, to which Rule 22 EPC applies mutatis mutandis.

Strategic note. A recordal made before grant takes effect centrally for all designated states. If it is made only afterwards, the national registers must be updated individually – with corresponding additional effort and cost. It is therefore sensible to deal with pending changes at the latest in connection with the communication under Rule 71(3) EPC.

4. DPMA – German trade marks, patents, utility models and designs

Formal requirements. The DPMA provides forms for recording a name or address change – in the trade mark area, for example, form W 7614 (change of name, company name, legal form or address; W 7616 for a transfer of rights); for the other IP rights, the recordal form A 9139 together with the associated forms. An informal request is also possible.

Requests are legally effective only if filed by post, fax, via DPMAdirektWeb or – where a qualified electronic signature is available – via DPMAdirektPro. A mere e-mail is not legally effective and is not forwarded to the file by the Office.

Evidence. For a pure name and address change, the DPMA normally requires no evidence; notifying the new name is sufficient. Where there are justified doubts (for instance, details deviating from the register), the Office may request further evidence.

Official fees. The recordal procedure before the DPMA – and thus the pure name and address change – is free of charge. (Fee figures circulating online for a “change of the holder’s name” do not relate to the cost-free register correction and should be treated with caution.)

Distinction from a transfer. In the case of a change of ownership, the request may be filed by the registered holder or by the legal successor. If it is filed by the legal successor alone, the registered holder is heard and asked to consent before the recordal is made (right to be heard, Section 28(4) DPMAV) – which noticeably delays the procedure.

Interface with the EPO. For European patents having effect in Germany, a change made before the EPO is transferred automatically to the DPMA only if it was made before grant. Otherwise the change must additionally be requested before the DPMA – on production of the EPO’s confirmation of the change (Form 2544).

5. Timing of the register correction

The offices do not publish binding, officially guaranteed processing times; the following figures are based on practice and may vary depending on workload:

  • EUIPO: Name and address changes requested online are processed quickly, often within a few days to a few weeks.
  • EPO: In practice it takes roughly two to four weeks until receipt is confirmed or any communication noting a deficiency is issued. A communication generally has to be answered within two months (extendable once by two months).
  • DPMA: Pure name and address changes are usually carried out within a few weeks. Where a transfer involves hearing the registered holder, the procedure takes correspondingly longer.

6. At a glance

CriterionEUIPOEPODPMA
Legal basis for name changeEUTMR/EUTMIR (identity unchanged)Rule 143 EPC; correction: Rule 139 EPCRecordal Guidelines, Sec. 28 DPMAV
Fee for pure name changefreefreefree
Evidence for name changegenerally noneevidence required (e.g. register extract)generally none
FilingUser Area / online formMyEPO / Form 5050DPMAdirekt, post, fax (not e-mail)
Fee for transfer of rightschargeable (exception)EUR 0 via MyEPO (since 1 Apr 2024; otherwise EUR 120)free
Typical durationa few days to weeksapprox. 2–4 weeksa few weeks

7. Practical points to bear in mind

  1. Characterise first. Before filing, clarify whether the event is a pure name change or a transfer of rights. Mischaracterisation is the most frequent cause of objections.
  2. An up-to-date register protects your rights. Only the registered holder can reliably enforce rights from the IP right. Outdated register data can impair standing to sue, the claiming of priority and – through the chain of title – later transfers.
  3. Keep deadlines safe. Official communications go to the registered holder or representative. Outdated address data carries the risk of missed deadlines.
  4. Bundle the portfolio. In the case of renamings or transactions, all affected IP rights should be changed together. At the EUIPO, stating the ID number makes portfolio-wide implementation easier.
  5. Update the European patent before grant where possible. This way the recordal takes effect centrally; after grant the national registers must be maintained individually.
  6. Secure evidence early. In transfers in particular, supporting documents become harder to obtain over time – for instance where the entities involved have been dissolved or restructured.
  7. Language and translations. EUIPO: five official languages; EPO: German, English, French. Foreign-language evidence may need to be translated.
  8. Misleading payment requests. All three offices warn against official-looking invoices from private providers. Official fees are payable only to the office concerned.

Photo: © Björn Láczay, [CC BY 2.0]

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