01Priority review system

In order to accommodate special patent applications and improve the examination speed of such applications, South Korea has established a patent priority examination system, which can be applied to the following situations: ① After the application is published, others are implementing the content of the patent application. ② When the patent application falls under the category of urgent patent applications as stipulated by the presidential decree. ③ When used for disaster prevention, rescue, post disaster recovery, and other purposes as stipulated in the presidential decree. The situation mentioned in Article 2 includes many situations, such as those related to national defense industry, environmental protection, export promotion, preferential treatment for small and medium-sized enterprises, national research and development plans, etc. In addition, reviewing projects through PPH can also speed up the review process. PPH is a business cooperation between patent examination agencies to share examination results. When the claims of the applicant in the patent application submitted by the prior examination authority are determined to be patentable, they can use this as a basis to submit an accelerated examination request to the corresponding application in the later examination office. At present, the intellectual property offices of China, the United States, Europe, Japan, and South Korea all support this cooperation project. The documents usually required for applying for PPH examination projects include a copy of the examination opinion of the prior examination office and its translation, a copy of the patentable claims determined by the prior examination office and its translation, a copy of the cited documents, and a claim comparison table

02Patent type conversion system(Change Request System)

After a period of 3 months from the receipt of the first rejection decision, no request shall be made to convert the invention patent into a utility model patent, and vice versa.

03Retrial system

The retrial system refers to the situation where, within three months of receiving a rejection decision and before initiating a retrial, or during the period from the date of receiving an authorization decision to the deadline for registration, the applicant may modify the application documents and request the examiner to conduct a re examination. Once an application for re examination by the examiner is submitted, it cannot be withdrawn.

If a retrial is filed against a patent that has been authorized or rejected, the original authorization or rejection decision will be automatically revoked; If a retrial is filed for an invalid patent, the original invalidation decision will not be automatically revoked.

04. Acceleration system for unilateral and bilateral procedures

In principle, the Korean Intellectual Property Trial and Appeal Board handles cases in the order of application, but in special circumstances, priority may be given to other cases, which can be divided into general accelerated "priority trial" and faster than general accelerated "expedited trial". The South Korean government allows 17 "priority review" situations, mainly including cases related to drug approval and semiconductor related cases. The application of "fast track trial" mainly applies to cases related to the confirmation of patent rights in infringement disputes litigation, cases under investigation by judicial institutions, etc.

Starting from the second half of 2023, the Korean Intellectual Property Trial and Appeal Board will introduce the "Trial Decision Date Notification System" to further accelerate the approval process, which specifies the specific date of issuance of the handling decision in the notification sent to the applicant after the trial is completed. Prior to this, the specific release date for processing decisions usually took 20 days and there was significant uncertainty.