d) Procedural economy – no carte blanche to amend claims at wish 

In T 1080/15 the independent claims of auxiliary request VII, filed after notification of the summons to oral proceedings, related to an embodiment disclosed in one of the figures and in the description which, however, had never been claimed. The embodiment had not been examined and did not amount to a converging development of the subject-matter claimed in any of the higher-ranked auxiliary requests. The board held that, although an objection raised for the first time by the board could qualify as an exceptional circumstance justifying the admission of a request, it did not give the appellant carte blanche to amend the claims at wish. The amendments should, as a rule, remain within the framework of the embodiments that had been examined by the first-instance department.