back to overview Revised Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal (RPBA) effective as of 1 January 2020

In a meeting at the end of June 2019, the Administrative Council of the EPO unanimously approved the revised Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal (RPBA), which was adopted by the Boards of Appeal Committee on 4 April 2019. The revised RPBA will come into force on 1 January 2020.

The declared aims of the revised RPBA are to increase (i) efficiency by reducing the number of issues to be treated, (ii) predictability for the parties and (iii) harmonisation. In addition, important elements of case management have been introduced so as to allow the Boards of Appeal to organise their work and use their resources in a more efficient way.

The revised RPBA could lead to significant changes in appeal proceedings. Particularly, the revised RPBA are intended to reflect the nature and the scope of the appeal proceedings as a judicial review of the decision under appeal, and thus, significantly limit the extent of review during appeal . In fact, the revised RPBA provide for a strict procedure regarding the admittance of “amendments” to the case, i.e., to any part of a party’s submission which is not directed to the requests, facts, objections, arguments and evidence on which the decision under appeal was based. In this respect, the general rule provided by the revised RPBA for admitting such “amendments” will be not to admit these into appeal proceeding unless - exceptionally - there is a manifest error in use of discretion of first instance or the circumstances of appeal justify their admittance. Moreover, the later new facts, requests, etc. are presented, the less likely it is that they will be admitted into the appeal proceedings.

These restrictions on the admittance of “amendments” are further combined with a strict time regime for the parties to present their submissions.

It is commonly expected that the revised RPBA will mean that the parties to the proceedings will significantly expand their cases before the first instance so as to cover all potential issues in the first instance. Accordingly, it is expected that such “front-loading” of the first instance proceedings will not lead to the desired increase in efficiency of the Boards of Appeal.

The revised Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal (RPBA) can be found under the following link. 
https://www.mueller-bore.de/tl_files/Decisions_EPO/RPBA%202020_communication%20internet.pdf

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