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Client Comment - VOLVO Korea

“We have been with UNIS over 10 years satisfactorily. When we entered the market, Korea had already occupied the foremost place in the field of construction equipment.
As the leading company in our field, we recognized the significance of protecting our intellectual property and urgently needed a law firm which can help us to protect our rights efficiently. Unis represented most of our company’s intellectual property related prosecution and litigation cases.
We would like to introduce one successful example case.”

Case Brief of VOLVO

1. Background of Trial against the Decision of Rejection for the VOLVO Construction Equipment :

VOLVO Construction Equipment Korea filed a patent application, “Variable Control Apparatus for Actuators of Heavy Construction Equipment” on May 2, 2005, but its competitor, Hyundai Heavy Industries Co., Ltd. submitted their product manual, “Robex 290LC-7” as evidence, for the information under Article 64 of Korean Patent Act. The Examiner rejected the application with the reason that the present invention had 30 inventive steps and adopted Hyundai’s manual as cited references. Unis requested a trial against the rejection.

2. Strategy of UNIS

UNIS has approached this case with the following points.

First, the copies of manual of “Robex 290LC-7”, which was submitted by Hyundai as evidentiary material, cannot be said to be published prior to the application because the printing dates of all copies were not identical to each other.

Second, there was a lack of reason that the present invention could easily have been made by a person with ordinary skill in the art from the drawings contained in the manual.

Third, the enlarged drawing which was submitted with the manual was not clearly found in the manual.

Forth, Hyundai submitted the same manual as evidence for another case. However, the names of the parts in the manual of this case were different from the name of the parts in the manual for the other case. Therefore there was no reliability on the submitted manuals as evidence.

3. Result

The tribunal decided with admitting the assertion of UNIS that made VOLVO achieved the patent right. It’s not only VOLVO was able to won this litigation case based on facts, but also UNIS's engineers and lawyer usually know the technology better than any lawyer, and can be the difference between a jury accepting or rejecting this arguments.