One highly conspicuous advantage of a European patent application is that all member states of the EU are targeted with one application and only one patent application has to be examined. Fees therefore have to be paid to only one patent authority during the examination phase.
Consequently, it is not necessary to communicate with different patent authorities in different countries in order to obtain a patent in all the member states. This provides fewer costs in the beginning and the possibility of abandoning some countries in the end. In this manner, you are in a much better position to select the commercially most interesting markets in Europe for your invention, since your final decision on which countries to choose can wait until the European patent is granted.
Contact one of our IPR experts if you have any questions regarding European patents and patent applications or you can fill out this contact form with your enquiry and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
You can also find more information on European patent applications in our brochure What you should know about European Patent Applications
