Patent decision

BL number

O/076/06

Concerning rights in

EP0876361

Hearing Officer

Mr G J Rose'Meyer

Decision date

21 March 2006

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Aventis Pharma SA

Provisions discussed

PA1977 Sections 28(3)

Keywords

Restoration

Related Decisions

None

Summary

Aventis Pharma SA (Aventis) was formed after the merger of two other major pharmaceutical companies in December 1999. As a result, 4 patent departments with 5 databases existed worldwide. It was decided to merge the databases into one, which was to be managed in France. The database programme was managed by the Vice President (VP) in charge of the Patent Department of Aventis. He had had previous experience of this sort of work and used tried and trusted staff and methods to handle the programme. Aventis also employed a French Patent Attorney who was responsible for implementing renewals. Aventis handled tens of thousands of patent renewals worldwide, so they also used a specialist Patent renewal service (CPA) to prompt renewals. During the database merge programme, it was noticed that certain errors were occurring. In order to supplement the other checks in the programme, the VP authorized manual checking of hundreds of letters to ensure due dates etc were not missed. Despite these checks none of a number of renewal reminders from CPA were received by Aventis. However, the French Patent Attorney believed she had authorized CPA to pay the annuity in good time via a computer generated list sent to CPA containing, she believed, 50 patents. In fact the list omitted the patent in suit. However, it had been company policy at the time to renew the family of patents to which the current patent existed, so it should have appeared on the list. Why it did not, remained a mystery. The VP gave evidence that the errors noted in the programme were not of the type which would have led to omissions from renewal lists. The checks he had instigated should have avoided this. The hearing officer held that Aventis generally had professional systems in place. In this case, they had made reasonable attempts to avoid the kind of error which nevertheless fatally occurred. However, he held they had shown the level of care expected by the law and consequently allowed the application for restoration.

Full decision O/076/06 49Kb