4.5.4 Submission contrary to fair and expedient procedure

In T 1271/13 the opponent had submitted report D11, underlying a new insufficiency objection, one month before the oral proceedings and a corrected version D11a one day before the oral proceedings. The opposition division had come to the conclusion that the experiment results had not been submitted sufficiently well in advance for the proprietor to have had the opportunity to perform counter-experiments. The very late submission of D11/D11a was contrary to a fair and expedient procedure. The board found that the opposition division had based its discretionary decision not to admit D11/D11a on well-established principles and had not acted in an unreasonable way.