Patent Drawing in Edinburgh.

Edinburgh is the one UK city where the drawing rules and the courtroom come from different legal systems. The formal requirements for your figures are set UK-wide, because intellectual property is reserved to Westminster under the Scotland Act 1998 — so an Edinburgh application is measured against the same Schedule 2 as a London one. But if that patent is ever litigated, section 98 of the Patents Act 1977 sends it to the Court of Session and nowhere else. A patent drawing Edinburgh applicants commission therefore has to satisfy English-drafted formalities and then stand up in a Scottish court. PerspireIP prepares UKIPO Schedule 2 figure sets for Edinburgh’s informatics, robotics, life-science and financial-technology filers, plus the matching USPTO, EPO and PCT variants.

Where a patent drawing Edinburgh filers submit actually goes

There is no Intellectual Property Office in Edinburgh, or anywhere in Scotland. The IPO operates from Concept House, Cardiff Road, Newport, South Wales NP10 8QQ, and Edinburgh applications reach it electronically through the IPO’s online patent services or on a paper Form 1. Nothing is filed over a counter north of the border.

This is a consequence of how the UK is governed rather than an administrative accident. Intellectual property is a reserved matter under Schedule 5 to the Scotland Act 1998, so the Scottish Parliament does not legislate for patents and there is no Scottish patent registry to file with. Holyrood is a few hundred metres from the Court of Session, and neither of them has anything to do with the formalities examination of your figures.

For drawings specifically, that means the file you upload is the drawing of record. No registry clerk straightens a crooked sheet, queries a margin, or asks whether a thin line was a printer-driver artefact. A formalities objection arrives weeks later as correspondence against an official deadline, not as a conversation. A patent drawing Edinburgh applicants order is therefore a pre-filing deliverable — the review has to happen before the upload.

Edinburgh’s real local IP infrastructure is advisory and academic rather than administrative: Edinburgh Innovations, the University of Edinburgh’s commercialisation arm, which files a substantial patent portfolio on the university’s behalf each year; the city’s patent-attorney community in the New Town and around Charlotte Square; and the Business and IP Centre at Central Library on George IV Bridge. None of them conducts a formalities review of your figure set.

UKIPO Schedule 2: the rules an Edinburgh figure set is measured against

Because IP is reserved, the standard is UK-wide. UK drawing requirements sit in Schedule 2 to the Patents Rules 2007, made under rule 14, which sets the formal requirements for every document in a patent application. There is no Scottish variant, no Scottish practice note, and nothing in Scots law that changes a margin. The provisions that decide a figure set are narrow and specific:

• Margins — at least 20 mm at the top and left, 15 mm at the right and 10 mm at the bottom of any drawing or photograph.
• The two-thirds test — the scale and distinctness of graphic execution must be such that the drawing would still be clear if reduced by linear reduction to two-thirds of its original size.
• Photographs are permitted where they are clear enough to be reproducible.
• Shading is permitted provided it does not obscure any detail in the drawing.
• Numbering — all drawings or photographs must be numbered consecutively in a single series.

The margin figures are the trap for anyone working from an American set. 37 CFR 1.84(g) requires at least 25 mm at the top and left, against the UK’s 20 mm, so a UK-compliant sheet can be 5 mm short of the USPTO minimum on two sides at once. We build to the stricter profile and step down, never up. Our guide to UK patent drawing requirements works through the schedule, and USPTO drawing margins covers the American side.

One Scottish wrinkle worth noting even though it is not a drawing rule: a UK patent application can be filed in English, and Scots legal drafting conventions have no bearing on the specification. The figures travel on the same footing as any other UK filing.

Informatics and AI: Edinburgh’s heaviest drawing load

Edinburgh’s signature filing vein is computing. The University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics is the largest such grouping in the UK and is ranked first in the country for research power in computer science and informatics, and the surrounding estate — the Bayes Centre, the Edinburgh Futures Institute, and the data-driven innovation programme across the city region — turns a lot of that work into applications.

Software cases carry a particular figure burden in the UK. Section 1(2) of the Patents Act 1977 excludes a program for a computer as such from patentability, so the drawings have to do real work in showing a technical contribution rather than illustrating a business method. Flowcharts, system-architecture diagrams, data-flow figures and signal-path drawings are the load-bearing figures in those files, and they are judged on whether a skilled reader can follow the technical process — not on how polished they look. Our guide to patent drawings for software inventions sets out the view set we build.

Two things go wrong repeatedly with informatics figures. Screen captures get used as figures, when what the claim needs is a schematic of the process behind the screen. And architecture diagrams are drawn with the boxes unnumbered, which makes it impossible to tie a claimed module to anything in the drawing — reference signs matter as much in a block diagram as in a gearbox. See patent drawing reference numerals for the register we keep.

Robotics sits alongside this and draws quite differently. The National Robotarium, on Heriot-Watt University’s Riccarton campus and run jointly with the University of Edinburgh, generates mechanical and electromechanical cases that need assembled views, exploded views and sectional views in the conventional way, plus operational sequences where a claim recites a method of use. A single Edinburgh robotics filing often needs both figure families at once: a mechanical set for the manipulator and a flowchart set for the control method.

Life sciences at Easter Bush and the BioQuarter

Edinburgh’s second major vein is biological. The Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh’s Easter Bush campus is one of the world’s leading animal-bioscience centres — it is where Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1996 — and Edinburgh BioQuarter at Little France clusters the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh with the university’s clinical research institutes and a dense layer of spin-outs in regenerative medicine, cell and gene therapy and diagnostics.

These filings bring the photograph question to the front. Schedule 2 permits photographs where they are clear enough to be reproducible, which is unusually accommodating: a histology slide, a gel image, an immunofluorescence panel or a flow-cytometry plot can sit in a UK filing as a numbered figure. That is genuinely useful for an Edinburgh life-science case where the result is the evidence.

The catch is that it does not travel. Under 37 CFR 1.84(b)(1) the USPTO accepts a black-and-white photograph only where photography is the only practicable medium, and some national offices refuse photographs outright — Austria’s own applicant leaflet states that colour tints and photographs are inadmissible, with no exception at all. So a figure set built around UK-permitted images can become unfilable elsewhere in the same family. Our notes on photographs in patent applications and patent drawings in Austria set out the two ends of that spectrum.

The rule we apply to every Edinburgh biological brief is the same one we apply to a materials case: pair every evidential image with a schematic that names the parts and carries the reference signs. A result image rarely discloses a structure, so it cannot carry the claim alone — and the schematic is what survives the jurisdictions that take no photographs.

Financial technology and design: the rest of the Edinburgh mix

Edinburgh is the UK’s second financial centre after London, and the fintech layer built on top of it — asset-management technology, compliance automation, payments and AI tooling for regulated firms, including university spin-outs working with the large retail banks — files a mix that is part software and part interface.

For the interface half, the register that matters is often registered designs rather than patents, and there the drawing is the scope of protection. Broken-line convention, consistency across views and the number of views supplied decide what you actually own, and a careless dotted line gives away subject matter you meant to claim. Our notes on design patent drawing requirements and GUI design patent drawings cover both, and the UK’s own registered-design route is examined on formalities rather than novelty, which puts even more weight on the figures.

For the software half, the section 1(2) problem above applies with the added difficulty that a method of doing business is excluded as well as a computer program. Figures that show a technical architecture — where data is held, how a process is distributed, what is computed where — do considerably more for a fintech case than a screen mock-up.

Where an Edinburgh patent dispute is actually heard

This is the part most often got wrong about Scotland, including by people who know English patent practice well. Section 98(1) of the Patents Act 1977 provides that in Scotland, proceedings relating primarily to patents — other than proceedings before the comptroller — “shall be competent in the Court of Session only,” and that any jurisdiction of the sheriff court relating to patents “is hereby abolished except in relation to questions which are incidental to the issue in proceedings which are otherwise competent there.”

So an Edinburgh patent action is a Court of Session action, heard at Parliament House on the Royal Mile. Procedure runs under Chapter 55 of the Rules of the Court of Session 1994, which governs intellectual-property causes and provides that Outer House proceedings come before the judge nominated by the Lord President as the patents judge, or another judge where that judge is unavailable. Cases are called early for a preliminary hearing at which the judge can make orders fit for the speedy determination of the cause — disclosure of witnesses or documents, expert reports, affidavits.

Three practical consequences follow, and they are the opposite of what an England-and-Wales checklist would tell you:

• CPR Part 63 does not apply. The Civil Procedure Rules are rules for England and Wales. The requirement in CPR 63.2 to start a patent claim in the Patents Court or the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court has no application to a Scottish action, and the claim-form marking in Practice Direction 63 is irrelevant here.
• There is no Scottish IPEC. The Intellectual Property Enterprise Court is an England-and-Wales court, so its streamlined procedure and its cap on recoverable costs are not available to an Edinburgh litigant. A low-value Scottish patent dispute goes to the Court of Session like any other — which materially changes the cost calculus for a spin-out weighing enforcement.
• The sheriff court is not an option for the patent issue itself, only for questions incidental to proceedings otherwise competent there.

There is a drawing-specific angle to this. A dispute about who owns the figures — a draughtsman’s copyright in the artwork, or unregistered design right in the depicted article — is a different cause of action from patent infringement, and is not caught by section 98’s “relating primarily to patents” test in the same way. We settle ownership of commissioned artwork in writing at the outset so that question never has to be litigated at all; see patent drawing copyright ownership.

On the European side, the UK left the Unified Patent Court after Brexit. A European patent is validated as an EP(UK) and enforced like any national UK patent — which, for a Scottish dispute, means the Court of Session. No UPC division has jurisdiction over it. EPO drawing practice has moved on independently, though: Rule 46 EPC was deleted with effect from 1 February 2023, the presentation requirements now sit in a Decision of the President of the EPO, and colour and greyscale drawings filed electronically have been accepted since 1 October 2025. None of that changes Schedule 2 for a UK national filing.

Patent drawing Edinburgh: how we prepare a figure set

We work from whatever exists — CAD, lab images, a prototype, a draft specification, or a competitor’s published set — and deliver one master plus per-office variants:

• Jurisdiction profile first. Every patent drawing Edinburgh brief starts with the strictest margin and line profile in your filing programme, so one master steps down to UKIPO Schedule 2, 37 CFR 1.84 and the EPO without a redraw.
• Line figure before image. Every structure gets a line drawing that discloses it independently, so a set built on UK-permitted photographs does not become unfilable in the US or Austria.
• Numbered block diagrams. Architecture and flow figures get reference signs like any mechanical figure, so each claimed module ties to something in the drawing.
• Reference signs reconciled against the description and the claims, with a register kept so later amendments do not orphan a numeral.
• Two-thirds legibility check run as a physical test, not an assumption — the Schedule 2 standard is reduction to two-thirds, and hairline weights fail it.
• Design and GUI sets drawn with explicit broken-line convention and a stated view count, because for a registered design the drawing is the right.

IP Landscape & Resources in Edinburgh

Key intellectual-property authorities and venues relevant to Edinburgh:

• UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) — the office that grants UK patents and registered designs, at Concept House, Cardiff Road, Newport — with no office in Scotland
• The Patents Rules 2007, Schedule 2 — the formal requirements for drawings in a UK patent application, made under rule 14 and applying UK-wide
• Patents Act 1977, section 98 — makes patent proceedings in Scotland competent in the Court of Session only, abolishing the sheriff court's patent jurisdiction
• Court of Session — Scotland's supreme civil court at Parliament House, Edinburgh, where Chapter 55 intellectual-property causes are heard before the nominated patents judge
• Scotland Act 1998, Schedule 5 — reserves intellectual property to the UK Parliament, which is why UK-wide drawing rules apply to a Scottish filing
• Edinburgh Innovations, University of Edinburgh — the university's commercialisation arm, which files and manages the patent portfolio behind much of Edinburgh's informatics and life-science output

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