4 June 2018

The EPO has for the seventh consecutive time been ranked
number one among the world’s five largest patent offices by users for the
quality of its patents and services in Intellectual Asset Management (IAM)
Magazine’s latest annual benchmarking survey. With nearly 900 responses, mainly
from IP professionals in senior positions, the 2018 IAM survey,
published in the July/August issue of the magazine, is the largest carried out
to date.

“One thing that can be relied upon is the IP community’s
confidence in the quality of patents issued by the European Patent Office,” IAM
Magazine writes. “[…] the EPO continues to garner by far the best
approval ratings of any patent office from IAM‘s readers.”

This year’s survey includes responses from professionals
working in IP-owning businesses and those in private practice, representing the
two largest groups of IP professionals. These two user groups were asked about
the EPO, Japan Patent Office (JPO), Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO),
US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the State Intellectual Property
Office of the People’s Republic of China (SIPO).

The results of this year’s survey have reconfirmed the EPO’s
position as a global leader in quality: In 2018, a significantly higher
proportion of respondents again regarded the quality of the patents granted by
the EPO as “excellent”, “very good” or “good” than for any other office listed.
Of those that provided a response,
91% of corporate respondents and 93% of private practitioners regarded the quality
of patents issued by the EPO as excellent, very good or good. Furthermore,
when asked how they perceived patent quality had changed in the past year, 17%
of corporates who responded and 20% of private practitioners responding said
the EPO had improved, both figures up from last year. When asked about the EPO’s services, 80% of
corporate professionals and 88% of private practitioners responding rated them
as excellent, very good or good.

“At the EPO we consider quality our number one priority and
we have pursued a dedicated quality management strategy in recent years to
further improve quality standards and processes, address user feedback and
provide even more legal certainty. We are very pleased that these efforts have
been confirmed once again by our users in this independent survey,” said EPO
President Benoît Battistelli. “This past year we have redoubled our efforts and
managed to improve our quality even further.”

The EPO has received top marks for quality and service in
each of the seven surveys that IAM has published since 2010. The next
edition of the Office’s own dedicated Quality Report will be published later
this month.

Further information