News and Publications

Announcement of the Irish referendum on Unified Patent Court

The Irish Enterprise Minister Simon Coveney has secured Cabinet approval to draft legislation for a referendum on the Unified Patent Court (UPC). The government is now set to craft the wording f...

Burden of Proof on Sufficiency of Disclosure – Does it automatically shift between instances at the EPO?

Sufficiency of disclosure or the lack thereof is a ground of opposition before the EPO and thus often one major battleground in EPO opposition proceedings, in particular for patents where compositi...

Case Report CFI 2/2023 – 10x Genomics vs. NanoString – Provisional Injunction I

1. Background and Summary Three and a half months after opening its doors on June 1st, the UPC issued its first substantive decision in case UPC_CFI_2/2023, a request for a provisional injunction...

HOFFMANN EITLE congratulates newly qualified German Patent Attorneys in 2023

We are happy to welcome four new German Patent Attorneys to our team, and therefore, congratulate Andreas Beer (Mechanical Engineering, Munich) Saskia-Berenice Gressel (Biotechnology, Munich)...

HOFFMANN EITLE Quarterly Newsletter 12/23

Dear Colleagues and Friends, In this issue of the Hoffmann Eitle Quarterly, we begin by discussing a groundbreaking decision by the UK Patents Court which held that an artificial neural network in...

Analysis of G 1/22 and G 2/22

G1/22 and G2/22: The EPO's Enlarged Board of Appeal decision on the entitlement to priority The decision of the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) in the cases G1/22 and G2/22 concerns the right to cl...

Abolition of the EPO's "10-Day Notification Rule"

The EPO's "10-day notification rule" will no longer apply to communications issued by the EPO on or after November 1, 2023. For example, if the EPO issues a communication of intension to grant (Ru...

HOFFMANN EITLE wins EPO oppositions against DNA sequencing patents

Patents relating to DNA sequencing technology have been subject to several patent disputes in recent years. This includes a series of EPO oppositions against patents owned by Illumina Cambridge Lim...

When does an application fail the controversial new EPO plausibility test?

When does an application fail the controversial new EPO plausibility test European patent attorneys are still grappling with the meaning of the new standard for relying on post-published data for...

HOFFMANN EITLE wins at the Global IP Awards 2023

HOFFMANN EITLE wins "Patent Prosecution Firm of the Year" for Germany at the Global IP Awards 2023 presented by IAM and WTR. This awards show recognised the outstanding achievements of law and att...