Insights

In its 2026 revision list to the Guidelines for Examination, the EPO expressly identifies the “Abolition of PACE for search” as one of the main amendments in Part E on procedural matters. This is more than editorial housekeeping. It reflects a reordering of how acceleration is meant to work in European patent practice: for newer European filings, the EPO has for years relied on a service objective to issue the extended or partial search report within six months rather than on routine applicant-triggered PACE requests for search; it then confirmed in a formal notice published at the end of 2025 that, from 1 February 2026, the PACE mechanism is in principle confined to the examination stage.

For firms, in-house IP teams and applicants who need patent timing to support fundraising, M&A, licensing or cross-border launch planning, the key question is no longer whether to file a search PACE request as a reflex. The more important task is to identify which files do not need old-style search acceleration thinking at all, and which files still require careful orchestration through Euro-PCT entry timing, compressed procedural steps, accelerated examination or coordination with other jurisdictions. In practice, acceleration is becoming less a single formality and more a docketing and sequencing discipline.

On 1 April 2026, the European Patent Office (EPO) announced that filing in DOCX is now available to all users after a successful pilot phase. Under the accompanying news item, presidential decision and Official Journal notice, European patent applications and subsequent documents may now, in addition to existing formats such as PDF, be filed in DOCX via Online Filing 2.0 and, where applicable, via MyEPO. The change is framed as part of the EPO’s broader digital transformation and its move toward end-to-end digital processing.

The practical significance goes well beyond adding another upload option. For applicants and representatives who already draft in Word-based workflows, use template-driven automation or coordinate across multiple review teams, the wider availability of DOCX reduces friction between editable source files and formal filing versions. That can materially improve version control and document governance. At the same time, the EPO’s legal and technical texts make clear that format flexibility does not eliminate procedural risk. If anything, consistency between internal versions and the actual filed version becomes more important when the editable source file itself enters the formal filing chain.

In an Official Gazette notice dated April 1, 2026, the USPTO introduced a new procedure for ex parte reexamination requests: before the Office determines under 35 U.S.C. 303(a) whether the request raises a substantial new question of patentability (SNQ), the patent owner may file a pre-order paper without a separate petition and without paying a fee. The submission is intended to help the Office assess why the argued teaching(s) in the request should not be considered sufficient to raise an SNQ at the threshold stage. The paper is generally limited to 30 pages, must be filed within 30 days after service of the request, and the deadline is not extendable. The third-party requester ordinarily may not respond, unless it obtains an exception through a petition under 37 CFR 1.182 with the required fee, in which case any responsive paper is limited to 10 pages.

What looks like a modest procedural adjustment is, in practice, a meaningful shift in the front end of U.S. patent disputes. Patent owners no longer have to wait until after reexamination is ordered before trying to shape the record in a sustained way. Instead, they now have an earlier opportunity to argue that the proceeding should not begin at all. For requesters, that change raises the importance of first-shot drafting quality, especially when framing a “new teaching” and explaining why the issue was not already decided or adequately examined before.

On 1 April 2026, the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) published “Patent factsheet: Accelerated processing”, setting out the main points in the UK patent timeline that can be sped up, including early search, combined search and substantive examination, accelerated search, accelerated publication, accelerated substantive examination, and early replies to examination reports. The page also makes two threshold points explicit: applicants need to pay the relevant fees for the steps they choose, and at least one claim must already have been filed. In practical terms, this turns acceleration from an ad hoc procedural tactic into a clearer official checklist that can be used directly in client conversations.

What makes the guidance more significant is that it does not present acceleration as an automatic good. UKIPO notes that an accelerated search is not usually necessary because the search report is normally issued within 6 months of the search request. It also warns that accelerated publication can expose the invention to competitors earlier and bring later fees forward, while accelerated examination and earlier grant can create a stability trade-off if citable earlier-priority patent publications appear too late to be considered before grant. Against the backdrop of the UK fee changes that also took effect on 1 April 2026, the factsheet reads less like a speed manual and more like an official framework for discussing the balance between speed, cost and validity risk.

The UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) has updated its “Design forms and fees” page with effect from 1 April 2026 to reflect the forms and fees now applicable to UK design filings. The updated guidance makes the charging structure for registered designs easier to read in practice because it distinguishes not only between online and paper filing, but also between single and multiple applications. Under the current figures, an online single application costs £60. Online multiple applications are priced on a tiered basis: £85 for up to 10 designs, £110 for up to 20, £135 for up to 30, £160 for up to 40, and £185 for up to 50. A paper single application costs £75, while paper multiple applications add £50 for each additional design included in the application.

On its face, this may look like a routine fee-page refresh. In reality, it matters for industrial design, consumer product and hardware businesses that treat the UK as a meaningful market. The structure of single versus multiple filing affects whether a business is better served by filing a family of designs in one coordinated step or by prioritising a core design first and adding iterative variants later. The online versus paper differential also turns filing method into more than an administrative preference: it becomes part of budgeting, workflow design and client communication. For that reason, the update works well as a standard source for a short briefing on the cost of UK design protection from 1 April 2026 onward.

The Japan Patent Office has updated a Hague-related procedures page to make one practical point much clearer: in procedural documents relating to international design registrations, such as amendments and written opinions filed at the JPO stage, applicants should provide an ‘Application Number’ field and state the Japanese domestic application number. The page indicates an update date of 30 March 2026. On its face, this looks like a minor filing instruction. In practice, however, it affects how law firms, agents and in-house teams map fields, generate forms and align filing logic with the JPO’s current expectations.

The real significance of this kind of update is not that it rewrites substantive design law. The risk is subtler and, for that reason, easier to miss. Teams may treat the change as a small website refresh while continuing to rely on older templates, auto-fill tools or internal assumptions built around the international registration number alone. When that happens, the likely consequences are not dramatic doctrinal disputes, but validation failures, formality corrections, avoidable back-and-forth with the office, compressed deadlines and unnecessary instability in procedural handling. For companies that use Japan as a key Hague node, this is exactly the sort of small operational change that can trigger outsized filing friction.