When a European patent is granted, it is mandatory to validate this patent in the desired European country registers.
To add these validations/regional phases in the tool, first select the EP patent in the family in order to display the asset data.
Then simply click on the options button (3 dots button at the top right) and choose "File EP Regional Phase".
NB: This option is only available when the EP patent has been granted (e.g. a grant number and a grant date have been entered in the tool).
If the EP patent is not yet granted, this option will be greyed > not currently available.
A coloured banner, available for 3 months after the grant date, provides a shortcut to this option.
You can enter national validations even after these 3 months from the " ... " menu above.
The system then offers 2 options for adding these European validations:
1. Instruct my filing agent to file EP regional phase:
Next step will be to specify the countries to be validated and to select the filing agent.
The filing instruction is sent from Orbit Asset by email and the related EP validations are created in the tool with the status "Filing in progress".
As soon as the designation orders are validated, the user will be able to fill it in and the status will change to "Grant".
2. Add EP regional phase which has already been filed:
You can specify the countries in which the EP patent has been validated and the patents will be added automatically.
Each national validation will have an automatically generated number (EP patent number + country code), which can be changed by the actual national register number (e.g. Germany)