c) Discrepancies between the clean and the annotated versions of a request 

In T 353/18, when admittance of objections to auxiliary request 3 under Art. 123(2) EPC was discussed at the oral proceedings before the board, there turned out to be a discrepancy between the wording of the claim in the clean and the annotated versions of that request. The respondent contended that the clean version was the valid one and that the discrepancy was due to an error when preparing the annotated version of auxiliary request 3. However, having relied on the correctness of the annotated version of auxiliary request 3, the appellant had not provided any written submissions on the specific wording of claim 1 of the clean version, in particular as far as Art. 123(2) EPC was concerned. A ruling on the valid (i.e. clean) version of auxiliary request 3 would therefore have required a substantive discussion for the first time during the oral proceedings before the board, without any prior exchange of arguments between the parties. Handling the case in this way would clearly have run counter to the primary object of the appeal proceedings, which was to review the decision under appeal in a judicial manner.