The Israel Patent Office has just published the schedule for the next round of exams for wannabee patent attorneys.

The Oral Exams will take place on 21 and 23 October 2012. The written paper, showing patent drafting skills, is on 14 October 2012 in the fields of mechanics, computing and electronic engineering, and on 16 October 2012 for chemistry and biotechnology.

The exams start at 9 am in accordance with Regulation 130 and at 2 PM in accordance with regulation 129. This is from the official written announcement. One hopes that people sitting the Exam will be familiar with the regulations, but for those who have not yet learned these off by heart, or for practitioners that can’t remember these, what this means is that the patent drafting skills exam is in the morning and one can write the specification and claims in English, Hebrew or Arabic.

As to showing language skills, that is in the afternoon, and applicants can choose any two foreign languages from the list English, French, Russian, German and Spanish to translate a technical abstract into Hebrew.

In the past, one language was considered adequate. I am not sure if this is still the case, nor do I know if it should be or not. I’ve recently had a patent cited by an Israel Examiner, which is only available in German and French, but Google does a reasonable job at translating which together with the drawings, gives some indication of the subject matter.

As per circular M. N. 60, only those who have spent at least a year out of the two-year training period are eligible to sit the exams.

For an application form, click here

אין צורך לצרף

Categories: Israel IP, Israel Patent Agency, Israel Patent Office, Licensing