French Patent Attorney
Representative before the OAMI
Representative before the EPO

French

The granting and validation steps of a European patent

Grant

At the grant, the granted claims must be translated into French and German when the procedure was in English, and the granting and printing fee must be paid.

Validation

Once the European patent is granted, it is necessary to validate is in the designated countries of interest.

According to the London Agreement, the translation and the validation step is amended as follows, for a text in English:

	Translation of the specification required	Translation of the claims required	Validation step before the national office
AT	German	German	Needed
BE	French	Already done	Needed
BG	Bulgarian	Bulgarian	Needed
CH/LI	No	No	Automatic
CY	Greek	Greek	Needed
CZ	Czech	Czech	Needed
DE	No	No	Automatic
DK	No	Danish	Needed
EE	Estonian	Estonian	Needed
ES	Spanish	Spanish	Needed
FI	Finnish	Finnish	Needed
FR	No	No	Automatic
GB	No	No	Automatic
GR	Greek	Greek	Needed
HR	No	Croatian	Needed
HU*	No	Hungarian	Needed
IE	No	No	Automatic
IS	No	Icelandic	Needed
IT	Italian	Italian	Needed
LU	No	No	Automatic
LT	No	Lithuanian	Needed
LV	No	Latvian	Needed
MC	No	No	Automatic
MT	No	No	Needed
NL	No	Dutch	Needed
NO	Norwegian	Norwegian	Needed
PL	Polish	Polish	Needed
PT	Portuguese	Portuguese	Needed
RO	Romanian	Romanian	Needed
SE	No	Swedish	Needed
SI	No	Slovene	Needed
SK	Slovak	Slovak	Needed
TR	Turkish	Turkish	Needed

* For Hungarian : the translation of the specification is no more required for the European patent for which the mention of the grant is published in the European Patent Bulletin on or after 01/01/2011.

When a validation step is required, it is only the filing of a translation, sometimes with the payment of an official fee, but there is no more examination of the patent.

After that, the annual fees must be paid before the national offices, even if no validation step is required anymore.

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