Table of Contents
A patent drawing Geneva filing is unusual in one respect: the body that will scrutinise your figures most closely is in the same city. WIPO’s International Bureau sits on Chemin des Colombettes, so a Geneva applicant filing a PCT application has its drawings checked under PCT Rule 11 a tram ride from the inventor’s bench. The Swiss national patent, by contrast, is granted in Bern, and any dispute about it is heard in St. Gallen. Three cities, three sets of expectations, and a Swiss examination regime that is about to change on 1 January 2027.
Why patent drawing Geneva work answers to Geneva, Bern and St. Gallen
Start with the geography, because Geneva is the one Swiss city where the international layer is local. WIPO is headquartered here and administers the PCT, the Madrid System and the Hague System from here. For a Geneva company filing internationally — which is most of them — the drawings are assessed against PCT Rule 11, which governs sheet size, margins, line quality, permitted text in figures, reference signs and figure numbering for international applications.
The Swiss national right is a different office entirely. The Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, the IPI, grants Swiss patents from Stauffacherstrasse 65 in Bern. Nothing is filed in Geneva, and a Geneva address on the application changes neither the formalities review nor the fees.
Enforcement moves again. The Swiss Federal Patent Court sits at St. Leonhard-Strasse 49 in St. Gallen and holds exclusive jurisdiction in civil matters over both the validity and the infringement of patents — there is no cantonal patent forum in Geneva, and a Geneva defendant will litigate in St. Gallen. Appeals go to the Federal Supreme Court in Lausanne.
One jurisdictional point catches people out. Switzerland is an EPC member but not an EU member, so it is outside the Unified Patent Court and outside the unitary patent. A European patent validated in Switzerland is a national Swiss right, and because Switzerland and Liechtenstein form a single protection area for patents, that right covers both territories together.
The Swiss examination gap, and what changes on 1 January 2027
This is the fact that should drive how carefully a Geneva applicant treats its figures. Until now the IPI has restricted its review of national applications to formal requirements and a partial substantive examination, without systematically assessing novelty or inventive step. No Swiss examiner has been reading your claims against the prior art and telling you that Figure 3 fails to show what you claimed.
The consequence is that in Switzerland the drawings have been carrying the disclosure unsupervised. A Swiss patent can be granted on an application whose figures are incomplete or inconsistent, and the defect surfaces for the first time in St. Gallen, in revocation proceedings, when it is far too late and far more expensive to fix.
That regime is being replaced. The revised Patents Act and the revised Patent Ordinance enter into force on 1 January 2027, and they change the calculus in three ways that matter for drawings:
- A prior-art search becomes mandatory for every application, and the resulting search report is published online alongside the application — so third parties will be reading your figures against cited art from day one.
- Applicants can elect a full examination covering novelty and inventive step, in line with international standards, instead of the traditional partial examination. The partial substantive examination is priced at CHF 400, with full substantive examination costing an additional CHF 300.
- Technical documentation may be filed in English without a translation, which removes a long-standing reason for rushing the technical content.
If you are prosecuting a Swiss family through the transition, the practical advice is to bring the figure set up to full-examination standard now. Figures that were adequate under a formalities-only review will be read much harder once a published search report invites the comparison.
What Geneva actually files, and the figures each industry needs
Geneva’s filing profile is distinctive, and a drawing set that suits a Zurich machine-tool application is the wrong shape for most of it.
Flavours and fragrances. Geneva is the world capital of the sector. Givaudan, the largest flavour and fragrance company in the world, is headquartered in Vernier in the canton of Geneva, and DSM Firmenich is the other half of a cluster that accounts for a large share of the global market and employs thousands of specialists locally.
These are chemistry filings, and their figures are rarely pictorial: structural formulae, gas chromatograms, sensory panel data and comparative tables. That is squarely within the rule that chemical or mathematical formulae, tables and waveforms may be submitted as drawings and are subject to the same requirements as drawings. For a patent drawing Geneva project in this sector it means axis labels, legends and table text all have to meet drawing character-height and line-quality standards, not merely look tidy.
Watchmaking and luxury. Geneva has led world watchmaking for more than three centuries and hosts a dozen prestigious manufacturers. Protection here is often as much about appearance as mechanism, which pushes work towards design registration — and the Hague System that administers it is, again, run from Geneva. Movement applications need exploded and sectional views that resolve dozens of small components; design filings need consistent surface shading to convey contour, and broken lines used only for visible environmental structure, never for hidden planes and surfaces.
Life sciences and medtech. The canton hosts several hundred medtech, biotech and pharma organisations. Device filings turn on sectional views and assembled-versus-exploded pairs; biotech applications often need the photograph exception, since gels, blots, stained tissue sections and crystalline structures are among the subjects for which a photograph is accepted as the only practicable medium.
Instrumentation. CERN’s presence on the city’s doorstep sustains a detector, vacuum and cryogenics supply chain whose applications are schematic-heavy — block diagrams, signal paths and control logic rather than product views.
Choosing a route from Geneva, and what each one does to your figures
Most Geneva applicants are deciding between three routes, and the choice has real consequences for the drawing set rather than merely for the fee schedule.
The PCT route. Filing an international application puts your figures in front of the International Bureau here in Geneva, assessed against PCT Rule 11. Rule 11 is the strictest of the three on text inside figures, and it is unforgiving about instrument output: a chromatogram that was legible on a laboratory screen is frequently not legible once reproduced. The advantage is that one compliant set travels, because a Rule 11 set will generally satisfy the national and regional offices downstream.
The European route. A European application is examined in Munich, The Hague or Berlin, and its presentation requirements no longer sit where most drafting manuals say they do. Rule 46 EPC was deleted with effect from 1 February 2023, and the requirements moved into a Decision of the President of the EPO, with the working guidance in the EPO Guidelines for Examination, Part A, Chapter IX. Any in-house drawing standard still citing Rule 46 EPC is more than three years out of date.
The Swiss national route. A direct IPI filing in Bern is the cheapest and, until the end of 2026, the least scrutinised. That is precisely why it carries the most drawing risk: nothing in the current process will tell you that a claimed feature is missing from the figures.
In practice a patent drawing Geneva set is built once, to the strictest standard in play, and then reused. Building to PCT Rule 11 and checking against Guidelines A-IX gives you a set that will also stand up in Bern, and that is the sequence we recommend to Geneva attorneys managing a family across all three.
Formalities that fail Geneva filings most often
Across the Geneva work we see, the same handful of defects recur, and all of them are cheap to avoid before filing.
- French-language text left inside the figures. Geneva is francophone and drafts arrive with French labels embedded in the drawing. PCT Rule 11 is restrictive about text in figures, and labels that should be reference signs keyed to the description are the most common formalities objection on a Geneva PCT set.
- Chromatograms and spectra pasted in at screen resolution. Instrument output is a drawing once it is filed. Greyscale anti-aliased axes and small-point tick labels will not survive reduction.
- Colour used to carry meaning. Fragrance and biotech figures often rely on colour to distinguish traces or channels. Colour is not freely available in every route and office, and a figure whose meaning collapses in greyscale is a figure that may not be readable as filed. Design a monochrome-legible version first, using line style and hatching rather than hue.
- Design and utility views mixed in one application. Watch and instrument cases generate both appearance and mechanism material, and combining the two conventions in a single set produces objections on both.
- Relying on the absence of Swiss substantive examination. The most expensive defect of all, and the one the 2027 reform is about to expose.
A pre-filing drawing checklist for a Geneva application
Run this before the application leaves the office. It is the list we apply to every patent drawing Geneva matter we take on, and it catches the defects that cost the most to repair later.
- Walk the claims and physically point to every recited feature in a figure. If you cannot, the figure set is incomplete regardless of how good it looks, and no Swiss examiner will tell you so before 2027.
- Print the sheets at full size, then reduce them and re-read them. Legibility after reduction, not on-screen appearance, is the standard every office actually applies.
- Strip descriptive text out of the figures and replace it with reference signs keyed to the description. This is the single most common objection on Geneva-originated sets, because francophone drafts carry French labels.
- Check that the same component carries the same reference sign in every figure, and that no sign is reused for two different components across a long series.
- Confirm every line is solid black and uniform in width. Exports from CAD, layout and instrument software are routinely grey and anti-aliased, which fails the line-quality requirement everywhere.
- Produce a greyscale version of any colour figure and confirm it still carries the same meaning. If it does not, redesign it around line style and hatching before you consider a colour filing.
- Keep appearance and mechanism material in separate applications, rather than mixing design and utility conventions in one set.
- Where a photograph is genuinely the only practicable medium — a gel, a stained section, a crystalline structure — say so in the application and supply a drawn figure alongside it wherever one is possible.
None of this is expensive at the drafting stage. All of it is expensive in St. Gallen.
How we work with Geneva attorneys and in-house teams
We prepare and remediate figure sets for the three routes a Geneva applicant actually uses: a PCT international application assessed under PCT Rule 11 by the International Bureau here in Geneva; a European application whose presentation requirements now come from a Decision of the President of the EPO together with the EPO Guidelines for Examination, Part A, Chapter IX, after the deletion of Rule 46 EPC with effect from 1 February 2023; and a Swiss national filing at the IPI in Bern, prepared to a standard that will hold up under the full examination option arriving on 1 January 2027.
Typical inputs are a CAD or SolidWorks export, a movement assembly drawing, instrument output from a GC or spectrometer, an inventor sketch, or a formalities communication that needs answering to a deadline. We work in French or English, return the set in the format the receiving office expects, and flag any claimed feature we cannot locate in a figure before the application leaves your desk.
IP Landscape & Resources in Geneva
Key intellectual-property authorities and venues relevant to Geneva:
- Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI) — grants Swiss national patents from Bern and administers the revised Patents Act taking effect on 1 January 2027
- Swiss Federal Patent Court — sits in St. Gallen with exclusive civil jurisdiction over Swiss patent validity and infringement
- WIPO — Patent Cooperation Treaty — the International Bureau in Geneva, which applies PCT Rule 11 to the drawings in international applications
- EPO Guidelines for Examination — Part A, Chapter IX, the current European drawing guidance after the deletion of Rule 46 EPC
Request a Patent Drawing Quote in Geneva
Request a Patent Drawing Quote in Geneva
Send us a CAD export, a movement assembly, instrument output from a GC or spectrometer, an inventor sketch or the formalities communication you need answered. We will confirm scope, cost and turnaround, and tell you before you file whether every claimed feature appears in a figure. We work in French and English, to PCT Rule 11, current EPO presentation standards and the Swiss requirements that change on 1 January 2027.
Explore related PerspireIP services: Patent Drawing services · our Switzerland IP services hub · patent drawing work in Zurich · patent drawing work in Basel · prior art and litigation search in Geneva.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do I file a Swiss national patent application from Geneva?
With the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property in Bern, at Stauffacherstrasse 65. There is no patent office in Geneva — what Geneva hosts is WIPO’s International Bureau, which handles PCT, Madrid and Hague filings rather than Swiss national ones. A Geneva business address has no effect on the formalities review or the official fees.
Does the IPI examine Swiss patent applications for novelty?
Not systematically, under the regime in force until the end of 2026. The IPI has limited its review to formal requirements and a partial substantive examination, without assessing novelty or inventive step. From 1 January 2027 a prior-art search becomes mandatory for every application and applicants may elect a full examination covering novelty and inventive step, at an additional fee of CHF 300 on top of the CHF 400 partial substantive examination.
Where would a patent dispute involving a Geneva company be heard?
At the Swiss Federal Patent Court in St. Gallen, which has exclusive jurisdiction in civil matters over both validity and infringement of patents. Cantonal courts in Geneva do not hear these cases. Appeals from the Federal Patent Court go to the Federal Supreme Court in Lausanne.
Is Switzerland part of the Unified Patent Court or the unitary patent?
No. Switzerland is a member of the European Patent Convention but not of the European Union, so it sits outside both the UPC and the unitary patent. A European patent validated in Switzerland becomes a national Swiss right, and because Switzerland and Liechtenstein form a single protection area for patents, that right covers the two territories together.
Can our figures keep their French labels?
Not as free text. PCT Rule 11 restricts the words permitted in drawings, and descriptive French labels are the most frequent formalities objection we see on Geneva-originated PCT sets. The fix is to replace labels with reference signs keyed to the description, which also means the same figure set works across language routes without redrawing.
Are chromatograms and structural formulae treated as patent drawings?
Yes. Chemical and mathematical formulae, tables and waveforms may be submitted as drawings and are subject to the same requirements as drawings. For Geneva’s flavour, fragrance and life-science filings that is the governing point: axis text, legends and table entries have to meet the same character-height and line-quality standards as any other figure, so instrument output pasted in at screen resolution will not pass.