New chairman of EPO oversight body to face tough task: lawyers
The newly-elected head of the European Patent Organisation’s Administrative Council (AC) will face the tough task of improving staff relations at the European Patent Office (EPO), but is likely to be up to the job, lawyers have told WIPR.
The EPO announced on Wednesday, December 12, that the AC had elected Josef Kratochvíl, from the Czech Republic, as its chairman.
Michal Havlik, partner at Všetečka Zelený Švorčík Kalenský & Partners in Prague, Czech Republic, said that Kratochvíl has a “superb” background and, with more than 30 years of day-to-day experience with patents, he has the technical and legal expertise necessary for the role.
Kratochvíl is currently serving as deputy chairman of the AC, and he is also the president of the Industrial Property Office of the Czech Republic. He will begin his three-year tenure as chairman on January 1, 2019.
Havlik said: “Under his leadership, the appellate body of the Czech Industrial Property Office has developed case law that carefully balances the rights of IP owners and legitimate interests of other stakeholders in the IP system.”
But Robert Sackin, partner at Reddie & Grose in Cambridge, UK, noted that the Czech office is relatively small, handling around 200 times fewer patent applications than the EPO does, so Kratochvíl’s roles are likely to be quite different.
The AC, which is made up of delegates of the EPO’s 38 contracting states, is the supervisory body of the EPO.
For the past few years, strikes and demonstrations have highlighted numerous internal tensions at the EPO, amid allegations that a damaging culture has led to low staff morale.
In 2014, the EPO was hit by seven days of strikes after staff walked out on multiple occasions, and earlier this year, staff also warned that patent quality was “endangered” by the demands of management.
“Kratochvíl’s priorities and challenges are to support new EPO president, António Campinos, in improving relations with EPO staff,” Sackin told WIPR, but “it’s a colossal task to change the hearts and minds of deeply entrenched ill-feeling of the EPO staff towards senior EPO figures”.
Havlik believes that Kratochvíl is up to the challenge, though, as he has already been successful in building good management-employee relations and “creating a friendly, but hard-working, atmosphere among staff at the Czech office”.
“I have no doubt that Kratochvíl will contribute positively to the relations at the EPO,” Havlik said, adding that the EPO’s new management team will also have a chance to turn over a new leaf in this respect.
Kratochvíl replaces Christoph Ernst from Germany, who was recently appointed as vice president for Directorate General Legal and International Affairs of the EPO after one year as chairman of the AC.
Austria-based Nellie Simon and UK-based Stephen Rowen were also appointed as vice presidents at the same time as Ernst, shortly after Campinos, former head of the European Union Intellectual Property Office, replaced Benoît Battistelli as the EPO’s president.
Robert Watson, partner at Mewburn Ellis in London, said that Kratochvíl would have been “closely involved” in the appointments of the vice presidents and Campinos, “so will be well placed to work closely with them in this new chapter of the EPO’s life”.
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