By Dr. Catherine Chammartin, Director General, Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI), Switzerland
Switzerland: Designing IP-regulations with Digitalization in Mind
By Dr. Catherine Chammartin, Director General, Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI), Switzerland
April 20, 2026
In March 2024, Swiss parliament adopted a partial revision of the Patent Act, introducing a voluntary full examination including novelty and inventive step, a mandatory search report and the possibility to file and publish a patent in English. The Federal Council also decided to completely revise the Patent Ordinance, which governs the patent examination procedure. As the IPI is involved in preparing the drafts of new IP-regulations, this presented a unique opportunity to design a modern IP-regulation with its digital implementation in mind.
A good IP-regulation needs to be a great many things: It must of course fit into the international IP-framework and national law. It must also offer users flexibility to address their specific needs and it must do so while being cost- and time-effective both for users and the IP office that implements it. Especially for small offices such as the IPI, this means the regulation must – whenever possible – be digitizable with the infrastructure and resources that the IP office already has.
Director General,
Federal Institute of Intellectual
Property (IPI), Switzerland. Image: Remo Eisner
The IPIs approach
To address these diverse needs, we took a holistic approach, including members from legal, patent examination, administration and of course IT. This ensured that all the necessary know-how and views were represented early on. We then roughly drafted how the new examination would look like, identifying possible scenarios and edge cases as well as guardrails (such as obligations from IP-treaties) or overarching principles (such as – where appropriate – the harmonization of our patent-, trademark- and design-examination procedures). These drafts were then translated into specific digital processes-to-be and business-scenarios. This helped identify digital roadblocks and elements that in daily business would generate a lot of work with little benefit for users or us. Once a viable process was defined, the actual legal provisions for the regulation were written, identifying potential (legal) issues. Drafting the Patent Ordinance was not a linear but rather an iterative process with constant back-and-forth. This helped find balanced solutions addressing the different needs. In addition, a public consultation yielded valuable feedback from users and their representatives.
In parallel to drafting the regulation itself, this approach and the resulting processes already allowed to plan the necessary changes to our software and processes ahead, thus giving the upcoming implementation a head-start.
Lessons learned
Drafting complex IP-regulation needs to take future implementation into account early on. This not only ensures that the regulation will actually work in practice, but also helps to analyse the costs and benefits of different approaches. In addition, involving different stakeholders early on helps foster a “common language” and understanding between them which again speeds up implementation.
Outlook
The revision of the Swiss Patent law is projected to enter into force at the beginning of 2027. It is an additional step on our journey to further digitalization of our work and ensures patent protection in Switzerland stays attractive, cost-effective and ready for the future.