OHIM’s plans to boost consistency

01 May 2010

Outgoing OHIM president Wubbo de Boer tells Emma Barraclough what the Office is doing to get better and faster, and the lessons it can offer other trade mark registries

Some trade mark applicants and their advisers have said that they would like to see more consistency in OHIM's decisions – both in examination and opposition procedures. What steps are you taking to address this?

Consistency is one of the standards we set ourselves in our Service Charter. We want to be fast and accessible and consistent. The Charter sets out what we understand by "consistency". We want our examiners to follow the manuals that we provide, and make decisions predictable for users.

We define an error rate of tolerance that we think is still acceptable and to establish whether we are reaching it we check a statistically relevant number of decisions ex post. That means that we don't influence the result. This is done every week by a group of experienced examiners. I think the results show that we are doing quite well when it comes to consistency of examination...

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