Successful Conclusion of National Patent Drafting Competition (NDPC) 2015

IIPRD, this year, with the support from Khurana & Khurana, Advocates and IP Attorneys (K&K), and Sughrue Mion PLLC, has launched a one of its kinds competition in India on Patent Drafting called as “National Patent Drafting Competition” or NPDC to promote the development of Patent Drafting as a Skill Set and encourage more and more technical people to take up Patent Drafting as a Professional Competency, along with identifying and encouraging Top Patent Drafters in Country.

The competition took place from 01^st September 2015 to 20^th September 2015 wherein IIPRD disclosed three invention disclosures in technical domains of (i) Chemistry/Pharmaceutical/Biotechnology, (ii) Mechanical Engineering, and (iii) Electronics/Software Engineering on its website for the above mentioned time period. We had kept First and Second Prizes in each technical domain with the First Prize amounting to INR 1,00,000/- and the Second Prize amounting to INR 50,000/-.

We got tremendous response from the participants all across India. The participants were spread across all sectors including law firms, patent searching firms, companies, institutes, independent professionals, among others. We received 81 patent specifications in Pharma/Chemistry/Biotech domain, 47 patent specifications in the Mechanical domain, and 33 patent specifications in Electronics/Software domain.

The evaluation was done collectively by representatives from each International Law Firm and Khurana & Khurana, IP Attorneys, coordinated by IIPRD. Broadly, the marking criteria were based on a combination of numerous factors such as the flow of the specification, the scope covered through embodiments, claim drafting strategy, and accuracy of technical coverage. For example, for Chemistry/Pharma invention disclosure, the following marking criteria was set up:

1. Detailed Description of Uses/ Methods of uses
2. Coverage of Salt, isomers, compositions, dosage, etc.
3. Background: Description of Prior Art and description of the need for the art
4. Claims and Claim Strategy
5. Coverage and Detailed Description of Markush Structure
6. Definitions of all terms and variables
7. Detailed Description of Synthetic Processes
8. Detailed Description of the Examples section– Chemistry and Biology
9. Overall Quality of the Descriptive Language
10. Parts of the specification, Format, Title, Abstract

After following a rigorous evaluation process in each category, we identified the following winners of the First and Second Prizes:

All the winners were intimated individually on their email IDs along with the public announcement of the winner’s list on our website on 25th September 2015. We once again congratulate big time to all the winners!

We look forward to announcing NPDC 2016 next year!!