Trial and Appeal Practitioner Study Group Report

The Trial and Appeal Department of the JPO convenes a study group every year, called the "Trial and Appeal Practitioner Study Group." The study group is comprised of practitioners including administrative judges, employees of the intellectual property department in companies, patent attorneys and lawyers. In addition, judges of the Intellectual Property High Court and the Tokyo District Court have been participated in the study group as observers since 2016. Each year's study group deliberates on trial/appeal and court decisions in actual cases. The results of the study are consolidated into a report in Japanese, available at the JPO website (in Japanese).

The English translation of the summary of the reports is available as below.

Trial and Appeal Practitioner Study Group Report 2024 (Summary) (PDF：4,865KB)

In the fiscal year of 2024, all meetings were held face-to-face for the first time in several years (some were hybrid meetings), and we had deeper and more active discussions.

At this fiscal year’s Study Group, the members discussed the following topics; as for the four patent fields (Machinery, Chemistry 1, Chemistry 2, and Electricity), the design field and the trademark field, (1) general issues (publicly worked inventions and determination of inventive step; determination of inventive step for parameter and numerical limitation inventions; acceptability of supplemental results submitted after filing in determination of inventive step; eligibility for patent (mental activities of humans, arbitrary arrangements); determination of similarity between designs (determining entity); Trademark Act, Article 4(1)(xi) determination of similarity of composite trademark) and (2) individual case (selected from court precedents considered important for trial and appeal practices and trial/appeal decisions subject to the court precedents) in each of six fields.

We would be grateful if you read the results of discussions by users of the Japanese trial and appeal system and find it helpful to understand the trial and appeal practices in Japan.