Friday, March 09, 2012 The 2012 exam

Today it's my exam day. I have received a copy of it this morning and am going to try to find all the correct attacks. For now, only some first impressions.

• No legal issues in the client's letter. This is not really a surprise. Over the years, the number of marks for legal issues has gone down gradually. Next year the exam will be one hour shorter and the purely legal questions in the client's letter were already expected to disappear.
  
• No prior rights. No added subject matter issues. No priority issues. There is a good chance that there will be some complex inventive step issues then. Or did they decide to make it easier this year?
  
• The claims look medical, but the only method claim of the exam is a clearly patentable manufacturing process.
  I see something that looks like a method step in claim 2. However, no human or animal body is involved. At this moment, I don't know how to interpret this claim yet.
  
• As usual there are some claims with ranges and I see a lot of 'suitable for' constructions. The main topics of this exam seem to be claim interpretation and inventive step.

Ok. That's it for now. I'm going to read the patent and the prior art and will come back to you later today...