Patent Drawing in Lyon.

Patent drawing Lyon inventors and their counsel commission has to satisfy three different standards, because almost no application from Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes stays on one route. Lyon is France’s second research hub – a health cluster that produces more human vaccine than anywhere else in the world, the largest chemical corridor in Europe, and a commercial-vehicle R&D base of a thousand engineers. Those filings go to the INPI in Lyon, onward to the EPO, and usually through the PCT as well. The figures have to travel with them.

Where a Lyon application is filed, and where it is fought

Two things about Lyon surprise applicants, and both change how a figure set should be prepared.

The first is administrative and convenient: the INPI maintains a regional delegation for Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes in Lyon itself, at 12 quai Perrache in the 2nd arrondissement. A Lyon applicant can deal with the French office locally, and the INPI grants French patents, trademarks and registered designs.

The second is jurisdictional and frequently missed: no Lyon court hears a patent case. Civil actions relating to patents are brought exclusively before the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris, whose Third Division is devoted to intellectual property and staffed by judges specialising in French and European patent law, with appeals to the Cour d’appel de Paris. Merits cases sit before a bench of three judges; preliminary injunctions go before one. A Lyon patentee litigates in Paris, always.

Where the Lyon court does have authority is the neighbouring rights. The Tribunal judiciaire de Lyon is one of only ten French tribunals with exclusive jurisdiction over trademark, design, copyright and geographical-indication disputes – alongside Bordeaux, Fort-de-France, Lille, Marseille, Nancy, Nanterre, Paris, Rennes and Strasbourg. So a Lyon design registration is enforced at home while a Lyon patent is enforced 400 km north.

On top of both sits the Unified Patent Court. France hosts a UPC local division in Paris, and Paris is also the seat of the Central Division, which hears revocation actions and declarations of non-infringement. There is no UPC division in Lyon. For a Lyon business that means one practical thing: a single figure set may end up before a French national court, a UPC panel, and a foreign examiner, so it has to be built to the strictest common denominator rather than to whichever office is filed at first.

Three filing routes from Lyon, three drawing standards

The reason patent drawing Lyon work is more demanding than a single-office job is that each route imposes a different rule on the same artwork – and the differences are all in colour.

The INPI national route. A French application filed at the INPI is the cheapest way to secure a priority date, and it is what most Lyon university spin-outs and SMEs do first. Drawings must be reproducible and legible after reduction, in the same tradition as the European standard the French system is aligned with.

The European route. This is where the law recently moved, and where a great deal of published guidance is now wrong. Rule 46 EPC – the old “form of the drawings” provision – no longer exists. It was deleted with effect from 1 February 2023, together with Rule 49(3) to (12) EPC, and the form requirements moved into a Decision of the President of the EPO.

Under that Decision, from 1 October 2025 the EPO accepts drawings filed by electronic communication in colour or greyscale, provided they use durable, uniformly thick and well-defined lines, strokes or areas, are rich in contrast, and display clearly at 300 dpi. The concession covers the drawings only – colour in the description, claims or abstract is still inadmissible. If a supplier is still quoting “Rule 46 EPC-compliant drawings” to you, they are quoting a rule that has not been in force for three years.

The PCT route. Unchanged, and this is the trap. PCT Rule 11.13(a) still requires drawings executed in durable, black, sufficiently dense and dark, uniformly thick and well-defined lines and strokes without colorings. Rule 11.5 caps the usable surface of a drawing sheet at 26.2 cm by 17.0 cm, with minimum margins of 2.5 cm top, 2.5 cm left, 1.5 cm right and 1.0 cm bottom, and reference characters must be at least 0.32 cm high.

The consequence for a Lyon filer is concrete: a colour figure that is now perfectly acceptable at the EPO will be irregular in the international phase. We therefore deliver a monochrome counterpart of every colour figure in the same batch, so the PCT set is ready before a notification forces it.

The Lyon health cluster: figures the colour rules were written for

Lyon’s biggest filing engine is health. Lyonbiopôle, the regional competitiveness cluster, was founded by bioMérieux, Boehringer Ingelheim, the CEA, the Fondation Mérieux and Sanofi Pasteur, and now coordinates more than 200 biotech, medtech and digital health members. The region is first in the world for human vaccine production and for bacteriological diagnostics. In 2024 the cluster was designated to lead France’s biocluster for innovation in infectious diseases, with EUR 60 million over five years under France 2030.

That subject matter produces the one category of figure where a photograph is not a shortcut but the only lawful option. In a US filing, 37 CFR 1.84(b)(1) provides that photographs are not ordinarily permitted and are accepted only where they are the only practicable medium for illustrating the claimed invention – which is exactly the position for electrophoresis gels, blots, stained cell cultures, histological cross sections and crystalline structures. Colour photographs are accepted only where the conditions for both colour drawings and black-and-white photographs are met, which in a utility application means a granted petition and the fee under 37 CFR 1.17(h).

For diagnostics and medtech work out of Lyon we therefore prepare three deliverables from one source: the colour or greyscale version for the EPO, the monochrome line version for the PCT, and the petition-ready photographic plate where the biology genuinely cannot be drawn.

Chemicals, trucks and engineering: what Lyon figures actually contain

South of the city the Vallée de la Chimie runs along the Rhône as the largest chemical cluster in Europe, concentrating industrial sites and nine R&D centres including Arkema, Syensqo, IFPEN, Elkem, Kem One, Adisseo, Vencorex and JTEKT. Chemical and process filings from that corridor lean on three figure types that are easy to get wrong: structural formulae, process flow diagrams, and analytical plots such as spectra and chromatograms. Each is a drawing in the formal sense and each is held to the same line-quality and character-height rules as a mechanical view.

At Saint-Priest on the eastern edge of Lyon, Renault Trucks opened its X-Tech Arena R&D centre in 2023 – an 11,000 m² building with roughly a thousand engineers, researchers and purchasing staff – and collaborates with INSA Lyon laboratories on driver-assistance and electrification programmes. Commercial-vehicle and ADAS filings bring assembly views, exploded views, sectional views and control-system block diagrams into the same application, often with sensor geometry that only reads correctly if the enlarged detail views are planned rather than added late.

The academic layer feeds both. INSA Lyon on the LyonTech-la Doua campus in Villeurbanne runs 22 research laboratories with more than 700 researchers and around 600 doctoral candidates, and over a thousand industrial contracts. Spin-out filings tend to arrive as conference figures and thesis plots, which is the single most common starting point we are handed in this region – and the one that needs the most rebuilding, because screenshots and anti-aliased exports fail the density and uniform-thickness tests before anyone looks at the substance.

Designs: the one right a Lyon company enforces at home

Because the Tribunal judiciaire de Lyon is competent for design disputes, registered designs are worth more attention here than the patent-centric reflex suggests – and Lyon’s textile, furnishing, cosmetics and equipment makers file plenty of them.

Design figures follow their own rules, and a Lyon company that also files in the United States meets 37 CFR 1.152. Two provisions do the work. Appropriate and adequate surface shading should be used to show the character or contour of the surfaces represented, and solid black surface shading is not permitted except to represent the colour black itself or to show colour contrast – which is why a photorealistic black render is objectionable where a shaded line drawing of the same article is fine.

Broken lines may be used to show visible environmental structure but may not be used to show hidden planes and surfaces that cannot be seen through opaque materials. Rule 1.152 also requires a sufficient number of views to constitute a complete disclosure of the appearance of the design, and it prohibits mixing photographs and ink drawings as formal drawings in one application.

The broken-line decision is a scope decision, not a drafting detail: it sets what is claimed and what is merely context. We flag every candidate boundary and ask before we commit it to ink, because converting a solid line to broken after filing is an amendment, not a correction.

Getting a Lyon filing through the formal examination first time

Formal review is administrative, which means every objection it raises was preventable with a ruler. These are the checks we run on a Lyon set before it leaves, and the order matters – the first three affect every sheet at once, so catching them late is what turns a small fix into a reissue of the whole batch.

1. Sheet and sight. One sheet size throughout, with the PCT-compatible usable area of 26.2 cm by 17.0 cm and margins of 2.5 cm top, 2.5 cm left, 1.5 cm right and 1.0 cm bottom. Drafting to the A4 sight keeps a French, European and international filing compliant at once, which is why we default to it even when the first filing is elsewhere.
2. No frame, no stray text. CAD title blocks, firm references and file paths survive export far more often than anyone expects, and anything inside the margins is an objection.
3. Line discipline. Solid, uniformly thick, dense lines assessed at full print scale rather than screen zoom. Grey anti-aliased strokes and variable-width sketch strokes are the two failures we see most in figures arriving from research software.
4. Character height. Every numeral and letter at least 0.32 cm as filed – measured after the sheet has been scaled, because scaling is what pushes an 8 pt callout under the floor.
5. Figure numbering. Consecutive Arabic numerals from 1, each preceded by FIG., independent of sheet numbers, with no gap left by a figure deleted late in drafting.
6. Reduction test. The sheet printed at two-thirds, checked for the first place that closes up. The fix is almost always an added enlarged detail, not a redraw.
7. Text-to-figure reconciliation. Every reference character in the description present in a figure, and every character in the figures present in the description – the check that most often survives to grant as a defect because it needs the file, not just the artwork.

For Lyon clients filing in French we also keep text matter inside the figures to a minimum. Labels that have to be translated for a national phase mean the drawing is re-lettered later, and re-lettering is where a compliant set quietly stops being compliant.

How patent drawing Lyon projects run with PerspireIP

We work the way a Lyon practice needs us to: as a draughting department you do not have to staff, priced per figure rather than per hour.

• Flat $25 per figure, quoted from your sketches, CAD files, photographs or thesis plots before any work starts – no hourly drift.
• Every route covered from one source file: the INPI/EP set, the colour or greyscale EPO variant where it helps comprehension, and the monochrome PCT counterpart.
• A formal pre-filing audit against sheet size, margins and sight, line density and uniform thickness, the 0.32 cm character-height floor, consecutive FIG. numbering, and survival of reduction to two-thirds.
• Reference-character reconciliation against the description, so every numeral in the text appears in a figure and every numeral in a figure appears in the text.
• Replacement sheets if an objection has already issued, prepared to the amendment rules rather than by editing the original.
• Working languages. We take instructions in French or English and label figures in either; text matter in the figures is kept minimal so a translation for the national phase does not require redrawing.

Turnaround is normally three to five working days for a standard set, and we can work to a priority deadline where a Lyon filing has to be in before a conference disclosure or a trade show.

IP Landscape & Resources in Lyon

Key intellectual-property authorities and venues relevant to Lyon:

• INPI (Institut national de la propriété industrielle) — France's national IP office, which grants French patents, trademarks and registered designs, and maintains a regional delegation for Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes in Lyon
• European Patent Office — grants European patents covering France; its President's Decision now sets the form of drawings after Rule 46 EPC was deleted in 2023
• WIPO – PCT Regulations — Rule 11 sets the international standard for drawing sheets, margins and line quality in the PCT phase
• Unified Patent Court — hosts a local division in Paris and the seat of its Central Division there; there is no division in Lyon

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