Thursday, February 4, 2021
There are changes at the EPO coming that require the specification to better reflect the allowed claims. In applications in which multiple inventions are disclosed, the new rules seem to be requiring editing the specification in some significant ways. In the case of this application, the term “embodiments” was edited to be used in conjunction with only the allowed claims. The specification in this matter is almost 300 pages and the editing performed was quite expensive. Further edits were made to the Summary and Technical Field to make sure they correspond only to the allowed claims.
To help avoid at least some of these costs, it seems that the term “embodiments” or similar (I am not sure if they view “aspects” or “examples” the same way) should be avoided for applications that will be filed in the EP to save costs for clients.