A CIPA/IPO meeting back in January (covered in posts here and here) looked into the issue of representation in front of the Unified Patent Court (see Rule 286 of the Rules of Procedure) and in particular whether UK patent attorneys will automatically have that right, might be “grandfathered” in or might have to sit some sort of additional qualification.

Back in October last year IPcopy collated a few of the submissions sent in response to the public consultation on the Rules of Procedure of the Unified Patent Court and last week the 16^th draft of the Rules of Procedure published accompanied by a handy “comprehensive digest”  that explains some of the reasons behind the changes to the Rules. We thought we’d take a quick look at both the original submissions and the comprehensive digest to see whether any of the respondents touched on this issue as well.

Out of the 12 submissions we listed back in October, three addressed the issue of representation and the comments made by the Association of IP Professionals in Swedish Industry, Bristows LLP and the IP Federation (the IP Fed paper downloads as a PDF document) are noted below. There are also a fair number of comments in the digest document (though the three listed above do not appear to be there). (more…)