Life On The Job


Patent Examiner - Laura Smith-Hewitt, European Patent Office

This interview was produced by New Scientist in conjunction with the European Patent Office, which paid for it to be produced.
Published Wednesday 11 March 2015 by
New Scientist. It is reproduced in whole.

A Day in the Life of a Patent Examiner

Lauren Smith-Hewitt

Innovation often starts with a “light bulb moment”. But after that it’s up to a team of sharp-eyed patent examiners to figure out whether a new invention deserves to be protected with a patent. Dai George asks patent examiner Laura Smith-Hewitt what it’s like to work at the European Patent Office (EPO).

What does a patent examiner at the EPO do?
   

At the EPO, our main job is to grant patents to inventors. We offer a uniform application procedure so that inventors can seek protection for their innovation in up to 40 countries across Europe, all through a single application in English, German or French.

Patent examiners carry out the fundamental work of the EPO, in accordance with the European Patent Convention. Every patent examiner specialises in a particular field, based on their science background. In my time so far at the EPO I’ve worked in several areas: I started out examining general-use laboratory technology, such as that used in medical diagnostics and forensics, and more recently I’ve specialised in the electrical analysis of fluids, particularly glucose sensors. For every application we receive, we search for similar inventions that have come before, looking for what we call “prior art”, and examine the claims of the new invention. We can only grant a patent if the technology demonstrates an “inventive step”, which means that the inventor has made reasoned and objective progress on what came before by solving a technical problem.

What kinds of patent applications are sent to you?
   

I see all sorts of different applications. We have applications from individuals but they’re relatively rare. Many applications come from the global players in industry – the company that files the most patents to us is Samsung, for example. But many big companies also licence-in or buy new technologies developed by small groups of research scientists.

We also receive a lot of applications from university departments. The EPO functions as a crucial link between academic science and the technology market. It is becoming increasingly important for universities to protect their intellectual property, so that they can spin off and sell the fruits of their research to technology companies.

Does a patent examiner need to have a science or engineering degree?
   

For any patent that I see, I need to be able to understand the technology behind it. When someone is applying to patent a diagnostic device, I have to know how that device works. I have a master’s degree in chemical engineering, and these skills help me to understand the claims and description for the technology quickly, along with any scientific drawings that the applicant provides.

So yes, patent examiners need a science or engineering degree that is relevant for the technical field they want to work in.

 

EPO
European Patent Office
(Source: EPO)



What other skills and attributes do you need to be a good patent examiner?
   

Examining any application takes a sharp eye for detail and an analytical mind. You need to be able to judge carefully whether an application meets the requirements of the law. If a patent can’t be granted for an invention, you must provide the applicant with reasoned objections in a clear and concise way, so that they have the opportunity to try to overcome them. Making such judgements relies on being thorough in your research and knowing the applicable patent law.

When someone files a patent, I have to find the prior art, and that requires me to look through a lot of patents and academic or technical literature using our IT tools. Every day I retrieve the most relevant documents from a huge range of databases, and I need to understand those documents quickly when I read them. It takes a great deal of persistence.

You should be ready for quite a steep learning curve. When I first came to the EPO, I knew nothing about the law at all, so I had to learn the European Patent Convention from scratch. The legal and technical training is comprehensive and lasts for the first two years of your career at the EPO.

There are three official languages of the EPO – English, French and German. You really need to know them all to work here. In some cases, if you can demonstrate strong skills in only two languages – say, if you’re a UK citizen with English as a mother tongue, but you have good knowledge of French – it’s possible to be employed on a three-year contract, which becomes permanent once you have acquired sufficient skills in the third language.

The EPO has offices in Germany and the Netherlands. Are there any perks to working abroad?
  

What’s nice is that you’re not judged on where you come from. Once you’re in, you’re judged purely on what you do – there’s no hierarchy based on which university or school you attended. I came here at the same time as a batch of people who were in the same boat as me. Nobody knew anyone else’s background, and it’s a bit like starting a new university course in that respect, though of course it’s very much a work environment. You all study for the same courses on law and how to use advanced retrieval tools to search for patents, and those intense weeks that you spend together contribute to lasting friendships. I’m still going to lunch with the people I met on my first day here. You bond together, and then it’s very interesting to find out about other people’s backgrounds and culture.

Living where I do in Munich, Germany, you have access to so much outside of work, from Olympic swimming pools to beautiful parks. I’ve visited our Dutch site in The Hague, and that’s great too – they have the seaside, for one thing, which we don’t have in Munich.

My home is the UK, and I still have family there, so once every two years I get additional leave to return. My children have thrived at the EPO’s in-house crèche, where they have been learning German, which I couldn’t have taught them at home because I’m not a native speaker.

Did You Know?

wind turbines
(Source: The Patent Invention Magazine)

The mini turbines designed by Alpha 311 (UK) are just over half a metre high, but can be enlarged to a height of two metres if necessary. In this way, each individual unit would be able to produce the same amount of electricity as 20 square metres of solar panels. And all this in an environmentally sustainable way.

The devices are very small (just 68 centimetres high and weighing 4 kilograms) and made entirely of recycled plastic. Their unique vertical design is designed to capture and exploit even the slightest air movement. A field of application could be motorways and highways. The special design of the mini turbines captures the kinetic energy produced by the movement of vehicles.



What’s the best thing about being a patent examiner?
   

You see the state of the art. I’ve always been interested in high tech, and at the EPO you see products before they get to market, some of which will later become successful, some not. I work in laboratory technology and diagnostics, and in my field I’ve seen the progress of the Human Genome Project, which began in the 1990s. I started at the EPO in 2000, and the applications I was dealing with often concerned test tubes. In the intervening years, the scale of the technology has been reduced; it’s gone from test tubes to nano-tubes, and now I mainly work on microchips. I’ve seen the development of “point-of-care” technology, which is hugely important in hospitals. Now, a doctor can be at a patient’s bedside, take one drop of blood and tell him or her what bacteria that sample contains.

Inventions are an incremental process, and it is often beautiful to see someone simplifying technology and looking for ways of making it faster. As Isaac Newton put it, we’re standing on the shoulders of giants. That is one of the reasons why I became an engineer in the first place: I liked the idea of solving problems and making things better for people. At the EPO you constantly see people making attempts to improve existing technology.

What challenges have you faced?
   

Sometimes, the patents we grant are challenged, often by competing businesses. They will argue, of course, that their company invented it before, or that their competitor’s alleged invention doesn’t deserve a patent because it is not sufficiently inventive.

These businesses can launch a legal opposition to the patent, which senior patent examiners must oversee. You’re sitting there under huge pressure, knowing that the case is highly significant in terms of its business potential for the entire European market. You’re trying to understand the technology, multiple languages and the law. But I like that because it keeps you on your toes. You have to rise to it, by investing the time and energy to improve your knowledge. I don’t like the word “stress”. It’s a situation you choose to put yourself in, to test yourself and see how far you can go.

What advice would you give to someone who is thinking of applying for a role as a patent examiner at the EPO?
   

Start by looking into what a patent actually is. You can go to epo.org/espacenet, and take a look at the patents held in our database. Even if you are not going to apply to the EPO, it’s useful for any scientist to understand patents.

To learn the languages, spend some time in either France or Germany if you can. You can also try listening to French and German radio stations and reading foreign newspapers online. Try not to be afraid of language barriers. As scientists, we already speak common languages of chemical molecular formulae and mathematics. French and German are just other ways of communicating your ideas.

Lastly I would say that if you come to work in the EPO, your scientific and engineering training is certainly not lost. You are still using it every day, and applying it in a way that’s a service to the public.

 

Activities

You be the Examiner! Carry out a SWOT Analysis

PrimaryPrimary MiddleMiddle  High SchoolSecondary

Critical
Australian Curriculum General Capability: Critical and creative thinking

LiteracyAustralian Curriculum General Capability: Literacy

Australian Curriculum Cross Curriculum Priorities: Sustainability Priority

Cooperative LearningCooperative Learning Activity

 

TeacherTeacher

To be reminded of the SWOT Analysis and its procedures, please click here.

 

Students

1. Form groups of 3 - 4 students.

2. Read the following article from The Patent Invention Magazine 6 April 2021 (2 min read) Read

The Patent Magazine
(Source: The Patent Invention Magazine)

3. Re-read again, this time you are going to write the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of these Mini Wind Turbines! This analysis is called the SWOT analysis. To do this analysis: In your notebooks, draw up a table: two columns and two rows.

Allocate - Strengths and Weaknesses; then Opportunities and Threats. You can see how these headings are opposites.

4. Brainstorm

Each of you is to brainstorm as many factors as possible.

5. Get together as a group and discuss what you each wrote down as Strengths and Weaknesses; Opportunities and Threats. What do you have in common? Are there any points that you need to work through?

6. Collaborate to the point that you all agree on each of these points.

7. Share with another group.

8. As a class, discuss each of the sections of SWOT.

Is this a great invention in your opinion?
What is holding it back?
How applicable is this invention in Australia?
As a class, would you pass it as a Patent Examiner?

 

 

Optional Extra

The Patent Invention Magazine has other inventions on this page. Look at one of them and follow the same process.

 

 

 

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