5.2.6 Oral submissions to be requested sufficiently in advance

Any request should be made sufficiently in advance of the oral proceedings to enable all opposing parties to prepare themselves properly for the proposed submissions.

In T 334/94 the board emphasised that a party wanting such submissions to be made had to ask permission sufficiently in advance of the oral proceedings to give the other parties time to prepare. The board noted that the Enlarged Board had not defined what "sufficiently in advance" meant, or laid down a deadline for making such requests. In its view, the deadline of one month before the proceedings for filing submissions or new sets of claims was a minimum. On that basis, nominating an accompanying expert one week before the proceedings was not acceptable.

In T 899/97 the appellant (opponent) requested that a technical expert be allowed to speak during the oral proceedings in order to explain the physical phenomena that occurred when a prior art separator was used. Pointing out that the relevant letter from the appellant had reached him only two weeks before the oral proceedings, and referring to G 4/95 and T 334/94, the respondent requested that this technical expert be refused permission to speak. The board considered the particular circumstances of the case, i. a. that this technical expert was one of the authors of the test report (R2) filed by the appellant with the statement of grounds, that the board had raised some questions on this specific technical issue in the annex to the summons to oral proceedings, and that these technical issues had already been discussed before the department of first instance. With these circumstances in mind, the board held that the appellant's request that the technical expert be heard had been submitted sufficiently in advance of the oral proceedings.

The board in T 89/04 refused a request that an accompanying person be permitted to make oral submissions as it had been filed only three days before the opposition proceedings.