A man of the people: can Campinos revitalise the EPO?
Benoît Battistelli’s reign at the helm of the European Patent Office (EPO) has, at times, been beleaguered by low staff morale. Does new president Antonio Campinos have what it takes to galvanise the office? That’s the question on the minds of patent attorneys across Europe.
With nearly eight years under his belt as head of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) Campinos is certainly an “accomplished Eurocrat”, explains Carrollanne Lindley, partner at Kilburn & Strode.
A Portuguese national, Campinos took up the EUIPO post in October 2010, and since then he’s been instrumental in providing a more efficient and engaged service.
He’s managed the changes required by the European trademark reform package to the EUIPO and, in 2016, the office launched its Strategic Plan 2020, which includes six main aims. Building a dynamic and knowledgeable organisation, and increasing transparency and accountability are the first two goals.
“Campinos brought the organisation forward in a rather difficult time and obtained political backing through his strategy,” notes Jesper Kongstad, industrial adviser and investor at IP firm Zacco.
Kongstad, who previously served as director of the Danish Patent and Trademark Office and chairman of the EPO’s Administrative Council, concludes that Campinos “did exactly what one should do” as executive director.
“Campinos opened up the EUIPO and managed to enlarge the capacity of the organisation in light of increasing demand,” he adds.
Wouter Pors, partner at Bird & Bird, also heaps praise on Campinos.
He says: “I understand that he is a man with a vision; he created a great team at the EUIPO and increased the success and profitability of the office.”
For Lindley, there’s been an increased flexibility which leads to a “good number” of inter partes actions being settled, which is “much better for stakeholders”.
A tough task
There’s also consensus on Campinos’s good people skills, a talent which will be of much use when he takes up his new position at the helm of the EPO in June.
In March, the EPO reported growing demand for its European patents after receiving nearly 166,000 applications in 2017, an increase of 3.9% and a record high.
At the time, Battistelli praised staff for their “outstanding efforts”, while noting that the EPO has successfully responded to the “sustained demand with efficiency measures that have increased production, productivity, and timeliness”.
But lurking beneath this headline statistic is a series of problems at the office.
“The backlog is legendary and the working conditions apparently unenviable and out of sync with the modern world. Simply saying ‘do more, work harder’ won’t solve the problem,” warns Gwilym Roberts, partner at Kilburn & Strode.
In March, 924 examiners submitted a petition claiming that patent quality is “endangered by the demands of current management at the EPO”.
They added that the timeliness and number of “products” shouldn’t be the only criteria used to assess the EPO’s and examiners’ performance,
“but that attention should be paid to providing a high level of presumption of validity to the patents we grant”.
An open letter from the Central Staff Committee (CSC) also cautioned that the only way to achieve productivity objectives “will be, for most of the examiners affected, to spend much less time for each single patent application”.
It added: “Ultimately, the responsibility for such poorly searched and examined patents cannot be attributed to the examiners any longer.”
Kongstad disputes the quality argument, explaining that patent quality has improved over the years, and has become a much more standardised operation.
“The only way to keep the services relevant for users is to continuously develop the efficiency of the organisation and the quality of products being offered. Efficiency and quality are very much intertwined,” he says.
Pors isn’t concerned over patent quality at the office being endangered although he remarks that there’s clearly room for improvement in granting patents earlier.
