Rafael Salomão Romano

In an ongoing effort to reduce the backlog of patent applications, Brazil has introduced new appellate stage guidelines that significantly impact how applicants should respond to office actions and file appeals. These changes emphasize thorough and strategic responses to ensure all objections are properly addressed, paving the way for a more efficient patent granting process. The motives behind the appellate stage guidelines can be traced back to around 2018, when the Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office (BPTO) began publishing new rules aimed at streamlining and expediting the examination and reducing the pendency time of patent applications, for example, of so called “preliminary office actions”.

The Brazilian PTO has officially introduced its longed-for strategy to solve the enduring patent backlog problem in Brazil.  The plan is to reduce the patent backlog by at least 80% in the course of the next two years with the use of “standardized office actions” – that is, machine-made technical opinions that will simply point out prior art documents to be addressed by the applicant.  Once the backlog is finally dealt with — likely by 2021— the PTO estimates it will to be able to examine future patent applications within twenty-four (24) months. If the goals of the program are achieved, the Brazilian PTO will be finally able to stand on equal footing with its foreign counterparts in the developed world with regard to the average patent examination time.

The Brazilian Government is considering the adoption of an emergency measure to eliminate the Patent Office chronic backlog problem by automatically granting, without examination, 230,000 pending applications until 2020. The emergency measure has been labelled by the Government as an “extraordinary solution” and a draft of the plan was introduced for public discussion. Companies may soon need to deploy a strategy within a time-frame as short as 90 days to take full advantage of the new system while minimizing potential risks… For the past 15 years, Brazil has been enduring one of the world’s most severe patent backlogs. The problem has grown considerably after the enactment of the 1996 Patent Statute, which was adopted to make the country TRIPS compliant.