2 October 2017, 12.30 pm
I have organised a thank you lunch for the oral proceedings course tutors. It is being held dans les nether regions du Posh French Restaurant. It is actually intended to be a working lunch, to debrief them on the last course and plan the next one. But people are far happier exchanging stories of what happened that time when they last went to an EPO hearing, and to be honest I am far happier eating my starter because it is a long time since I got out of bed this morning and I am hungry. So we do a small amount of debriefing and planning, and the rest of the time they ignore me and I ignore them and everything est beaucoup civilised. Among the beaucoup de civilised decisions we make about next year’s course are the following. Firstly, we are not going to do an advanced course on appeal proceedings, because even the EPO do not know how appeal proceedings are going to proceed once the rules have been rewritten and the Boards of Appeal rehoused. Secondly, we are not going to make the current course more difficult, because although some of the delegates appear just a little too confident, we know for a fact that their confidence is misplaced. Thirdly, we may include some additional teaching on advocacy and presentation skills, for instance about standing up straight and modulating your voice and not chewing your pen top or otherwise irritating the tribunal, because this is indeed one of the areas in which we think people’s confidence may be misplaced. Finally, we may or may not introduce some more guidance in the mock hearings about what the putative client wants out of the patent. Delegates have in the past suggested that such information might have helped them prepare for the hearings, when they finally got round to looking at the papers an hour before the workshop. But whilst we agree with the premise about the information being useful, we also believe it is more realistic if you have not the foggiest idea what your client wants before you go into the hearing, and the client has not the foggiest idea what is going to happen in the hearing, and only after the tribunal’s decision does either of you realise how badly wrong it all went. We are similarly disinclined to give a helpful preliminary opinion from the tribunal, because it is also more realistic to go into a hearing with not the foggiest idea what you are going to have to argue about or why. The only other thing we have decided is that we need beaucoup more tutors. The current few are getting grumpy and Le Posh French Restaurant may not let them in again next time.
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