How to Properly Measure the Performance of a Patent Office
A "contribution from staff [which] is published by SUEPO Munich."
Patents are neither services nor products. Patents are time-limited monopolies. Good luck explaining that simple point to people with zero background in patents and ample time for lobbying. These people lobby for their own appointments that render them millionaires - in fact millionaires who can shout the "f word" at staff without any consequences and can also protect cocaine use in Europe's second-largest public institution.
At the end of last month we recalled that European Patent grants had gone down by over 25% in 3 months (probably even more sharply by now) because examiners decided to become more strict as a form of protest against abusive managers.
Yesterday the union (SUEPO Munich) circulated a paper on what the Office really ought to measure or equate with "production". The message made it clear that the essay or paper had been relayed from staff, one might assume an EPO examiner. To quote:
Dear SUEPO members,
Dear Colleagues,For over two decades, management at the European Patent Office (EPO) has evaluated patent examination primarily through a production-oriented lens. By heavily relying on quantitative output metrics to assess staff performance, the EPO has fallen victim to Goodhart’s Law, which states that once a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a reliable measure.
Because strict production targets are tied to the career system, staff are strongly incentivized to "game the system." Examiners logically adapt by prioritizing tasks that quickly yield production points while avoiding rigorous, time-consuming duties like patent refusals or summons to oral proceedings that offer no commensurate reward. Consequently, genuine examination quality has been overshadowed by easily attainable, superficial indicators like timeliness.
Ultimately, prioritizing numerical quotas over comprehensive quality assessments drives staff to optimize for point accumulation rather than maintaining the true rigor of the patent examination process. If left unchecked, this deterioration in quality and integrity risks a severe loss of institutional reputation, which could have highly damaging long-term consequences for the EPO.
This paper is a contribution from staff and is published by SUEPO Munich.
The full paper, for anyone who wishes to read it (this applies not only to the EPO):
INTERNATIONALE GEWERKSCHAFT IM EUROPÄISCHEN PATENTAMT
STAFF UNION OF THE EUROPEAN PATENT OFFICE
UNION SYNDICALE DE L'OFFICE EUROPEEN DES BREVETSOrtssektion München
Local section Munich
Section locale de Munich13 July 2026
su26022mp – 0.2.1/0.2.2This paper is a contribution from staff and is published by SUEPO Munich.
Measuring what matters
Dear Colleagues,
For more than two decades, management at the European Patent Office has increasingly viewed examination work through a production oriented lens. To some extent, this is understandable since output generates revenue, and productivity figures are relatively straightforward to measure. Consequently, successive management initiatives, whether presented as "bottom-up approaches," "holistic" or other performance frameworks packaged in fashionable management jargon, have relied heavily on production metrics to define expectations and evaluate staff performance.
In setting these expectations, management has placed considerable emphasis on quantitative output, effectively reducing a complex professional activity to a matter of numerical production. Staff are assessed primarily through output metrics, much as farmers might evaluate their chickens by counting eggs rather than considering broader indicators of health or quality. Problems arise, however, when such metrics are used not merely to measure performance but to control it. As British economist Charles Goodhart observed in 1975, once a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a reliable indicator. This principle, now known as Goodhart’s Law, captures a simple but important dynamic: when individuals are incentivized to optimise a particular measure, that measure no longer accurately reflects the underlying reality it was intended to represent.
In practice, this often results in what is commonly described as "gaming the system." When individuals know that their performance will be judged according to a specific metric, they have a strong incentive to maximise that metric, even when doing so undermines the broader objective it was designed to advance. As a result, apparent improvements in measured performance may conceal a deterioration in the quality, effectiveness, or integrity of the underlying activity.
This is precisely what has occurred at the European Patent Office. Once production targets were imposed on patent examiners and other PGP staff (the employees responsible for the patent granting process) and rigorously enforced through a career system that penalised those who failed to meet them, behaviour adapted exactly as Goodhart’s Law would predict.
For many examiners, particularly in high-output and accommodating divisions, securing a point has been reduced to little more than the painstaking completion of Trimaran forms. Refusals, by contrast, are often avoided because they require substantial additional effort, including the preparation and conduct of oral proceedings, without yielding a commensurate reward in the production system. Meanwhile, quality criteria have seldom been enforced in any meaningful or consistent manner.
Examiners, being no chickens, have responded rationally to the incentives placed before them. With the tacit support of managers, quality has gradually been redefined through easily attainable indicators such as timeliness or vaguely formulated "holistic" assessments. The predictable consequence has been optimisation for point accumulation rather than examination quality.
The implicit assumption behind the Office's productivity driven reforms is that substantial increases in output can be achieved without compromising patent quality. The relevant notion of quality in this context is not compliance with internal procedures, timeliness targets, or administrative formalities. Rather, it is the ability of granted patents to withstand adversarial scrutiny and to provide legal certainty when challenged by competitors, courts, or the public.
To support the proposition that quality has been preserved, the Office relies primarily on internal quality indicators. Yet such indicators suffer from an inherent limitation. Any organisation assessing the success of its own policies faces an unavoidable conflict of interest. Internal metrics may provide useful operational information, but they cannot constitute independent proof that the system continues to produce patents of the same legal robustness as before.
If patent quality is to be assessed credibly, external indicators are required. The most relevant indicators are opposition outcomes, revocation rates before national courts and the Unified Patent Court, litigation outcomes, and other indicators tied to the ultimate legal robustness of granted patents when subjected to real-world challenge.
At present, opposition outcomes remain one of the few readily available external indicators. These outcomes are noteworthy: a substantial majority of opposed patents (>70%) do not survive opposition proceedings in their granted form and are either amended or revoked. While this does not necessarily prove that overall patent quality has been compromised, it should at least prompt further investigation.
Management may argue that opposition proceedings are not representative because only a small proportion of patents are opposed and that those patents are more likely to be weak. However, this argument is itself speculative. Opposition rates are influenced by many factors unrelated to patent validity, including litigation budgets, portfolio strategies, market structure, and the commercial incentives of competitors. In many technical fields, patents are not challenged because the economic incentives to do so are insufficient, not because the patents are necessarily robust. Conversely, sectors dominated by a small number of large players with substantial legal resources tend to generate significantly higher opposition rates, regardless of the quality of the patents.
The absence of an opposition should therefore not be interpreted as evidence of patent quality. At most, it demonstrates that no party considered it worthwhile to challenge the patent under the circumstances.
More fundamentally, the burden of proof should not lie with others to demonstrate that quality has declined. The Office has fundamentally altered production targets, performance management systems, and examiner incentives. It is therefore incumbent upon those who designed and implemented these reforms to demonstrate that the essential characteristics of the system have been preserved.
An analogy may be helpful. When engineers introduce significant structural modifications to an aircraft, they are expected to demonstrate that safety requirements continue to be met. The burden does not fall on pilots to prove that the aircraft has become unsafe. While
patent examination is obviously not aviation, the underlying principle is the same: those who redesign a system bear responsibility for demonstrating that its critical performance standards remain intact.
What is not in dispute is that examiner behaviour has changed. Productivity has increased substantially, with output rising by approximately 10% compared with 2018. (The real figures are likely higher; under the current framework, training and other activities are counted toward productivity metrics, whereas they were excluded in the past.) Examination practices have also evolved, with the proportion of cases receiving a summons falling by around 50%, while refusal rates have declined by approximately 60% since 2019. These developments are entirely consistent with the operation of Goodhart's Law described above. The existence of behavioural change is therefore not the issue. Rather, the key question is whether the Office has sufficiently robust, independent evidence to demonstrate that these changes have not adversely affected patent quality or legal certainty.
For the Administrative Council, this is ultimately a question of governance. The Council's role extends beyond monitoring production figures and financial performance. It also includes ensuring that the mechanisms used to assess quality are sufficiently independent, transparent, and credible to justify continued confidence in the European patent system. Without such evidence, claims that quality has been preserved remain assertions rather than demonstrated facts.
If such policies continue and quality is on the decline, reality will eventually catch up. Given the scale of the Office's budget surpluses, the question is no longer whether it can afford more rigorous and credible quality monitoring, but whether it can afford not to.
The European Union has already recognised the strategic importance of a patent system that genuinely supports innovation and economic growth, a theme prominently highlighted during the debate surrounding Mario Draghi's 2024 report on European competitiveness. Such a system should foster technological progress rather than inadvertently encouraging the accumulation of extensive patent portfolios by a limited number of powerful corporations, entities frequently referred to by the Office as its "clients", at the expense of smaller companies and start-ups, which often serve as the primary source of innovation and future economic growth.
Should concerns about patent quality and the legitimacy of the system continue to grow, pressure for institutional reform may eventually emerge. The introduction of the Unitary Patent has already brought the European patent framework closer to the European Union than at any previous stage in its history. Questions of governance, accountability and oversight can therefore no longer be viewed in complete isolation from broader European policy considerations.
Whether this could ultimately result in a greater role for the European Union Intellectual Property Office in Alicante remains uncertain. Yet institutional developments that initially appear unlikely often become more plausible once confidence in existing arrangements begins to erode. History offers many examples of structures regarded as permanent until the assumptions underpinning them were challenged.
If confidence in the European patent system were to weaken significantly, the European Union might seek to exercise greater influence over patent administration through one of its own institutions. The patent system's capacity to generate substantial and recurring revenue could strengthen such incentives, particularly at a time when the Union faces increasing financial pressures and a more demanding geopolitical environment. In such
circumstances, the EUIPO in Alicante would present an obvious institutional foundation on which to build.
This possibility is frequently dismissed as unrealistic. Yet it is not difficult to imagine a gradual rather than revolutionary evolution. An expanded role for the EUIPO could initially be confined to the administration of unitary patents, while search and examination activities remain with the European Patent Office. Such arrangements would not be unprecedented. Several national patent offices within the EPC framework already rely heavily on the EPO for search and substantive examination. Over time, a similar model could allow the EUIPO to expand on its expertise in patent administration, search and examination, progressively reducing its dependence on the EPO.
The broader lesson is straightforward. The Office's most valuable asset is neither its financial surplus, nor its productivity statistics, nor the sheer volume of patents it grants. Its true strength lies in its reputation for quality, legal certainty and technical excellence. That reputation has been built over decades, but reputational capital is considerably easier to lose than to restore. It would therefore be unwise to assume that confidence can be maintained indefinitely in the absence of robust and independent evidence demonstrating that the incentives governing examination remain aligned with the Office's fundamental mission.
No one can predict with confidence what the European patent landscape will look like in ten or twenty years' time. Nevertheless, developments that appear improbable today may become increasingly plausible if confidence in existing institutions continues to erode. For that reason, any future expansion of patent-related functions within the EUIPO warrants close attention, not because it would necessarily signal imminent change, but because it could provide an early indication of a broader reconfiguration of the European patent system. Over the longer term, such a shift could potentially challenge the EPO’s de facto monopoly over the grant of European patents and gradually reduce it to a more limited regional office with reduced or no patent-granting authority.
It rightly says that "developments that appear improbable today may become increasingly plausible if confidence in existing institutions continues to erode."
That's the EPO.
Where does it stand today?
Well, cocaine addicts are allowed to run it and from what I've been told European press is afraid to mention it for fear of frivolous litigation (SLAPPs).
So this is where Europe's largest institutions stand today? █