This article is part 3 in a 3-part series celebrating 120 years of FICPI.
Spend five minutes at an IP conference and you will hear some version of the same claim: everything is changing. Artificial intelligence will transform patent drafting, searching, examination, portfolio management, perhaps litigation too. It may do all of those things. What is striking is how familiar the conversation sounds.
Patent and trade mark attorneys have always had a slightly complicated relationship with change. They spend their working lives helping clients protect new technology and new brands, yet they are rightly sceptical when a new system promises to make professional judgement less important. That scepticism has a long history, and the Patent Cooperation Treaty is where it starts.
Harmonisation through the decades
The PCT is now part of ordinary professional life. Attorneys use it without treating it as a disruptive event. That was not how the proposal looked at Cannes in 1967, under FICPI President René Jourdain, when it raised serious questions for many practitioners. Would international filing help applicants or weaken the role of national advisers? Would centralisation improve access or obscure local legal consequences? Where would professional responsibility sit? These were not parochial worries: a filing system can be international, but legal rights remain territorial, and clients still need advice from people who understand what happens after filing. The PCT did not remove that need. It made coordination more important.
The harmonisation debates of the 1980s followed the same pattern, this time over the price of consistency rather than the fact of it. At Edinburgh in 1981, under President Per-Urban Hjärne, in a resolution that marked FICPI's shift from cautious observer to active advocate, FICPI urged WIPO and the European Patent Office to study a grace period, so that inventors and companies would stop losing patent rights over premature disclosure under strict novelty rules. By Hilton Head in 1987, under President Camille Polus, FICPI had moved from raising the problem to setting terms for a solution, backing a first-to-file system on condition that it came bundled with an international grace period. Change should not be rejected because it is change, nor accepted because it promises efficiency. The right question is whether reform improves the system for the people who use it, a test FICPI applied consistently across both congresses.
The digital shift created another version of the same debate. Patent offices faced rising volumes, paper systems were under pressure, and electronic tools promised speed and consistency. Practitioners wanted the benefits, but they wanted safeguards too. At Vienna in 1994, under President Helmut Sonn, in the congress that elected Knud Raffnsøe as his successor, FICPI's position on electronic filing set out concerns that anyone who has dealt with an online filing problem will recognise: consultation with users before rules are set, certainty around filing dates, restoration of rights when systems fail through no fault of the applicant, and reliable confirmation of receipt. Digital systems are useful only if users can trust them.
Subject matter debates brought a different kind of disruption. Software forced patent law to confront the boundary between technical contribution and abstract idea. Biotechnology raised questions about biological material, invention, discovery and the proper scope of protection. Computer-implemented inventions brought those questions back into political focus in Europe in the early 2000s. Each debate was presented as new, and in one sense each was: the technologies differed, the business context differed, the political pressures differed. But the professional task stayed familiar, apply established legal principles to new forms of innovation without letting either enthusiasm or fear take over.
Adapting without abandoning
Artificial intelligence is the latest test. FICPI's 2025 resolution on human-centric use of AI in the IP system, passed at the Naples World Congress under President Roberto Pistolesi, at which Elia Sugrañes was elected to succeed him, recognises that AI is already used by attorneys, applicants, offices and others in the system.
It does not pretend AI can be ignored, and it does not treat it as magic. Its central point is sober: substantive decisions on IP rights should remain subject to at least one competent human examiner or judge. That is the right centre of gravity, and the Federation paired it with a second Naples resolution on cooperation across the IP ecosystem, which ties the same growing use of AI to a wider point about trust between users, offices and attorneys. A third resolution, on consistency and certainty in functional claiming, adopted the following April at the Executive Committee in Istanbul, shows the same instinct in a more technical setting: the need is not novelty for its own sake but clarity, predictability and reasoned decision-making.
FICPI has seen versions of this before. The Cannes generation, under René Jourdain, faced international filing. The Edinburgh generation, under Per-Urban Hjärne, and the Hilton Head generation, under Camille Polus, faced harmonisation. The Vienna generation, under Helmut Sonn, faced electronic filing. The early 2000s brought computer-implemented inventions. The present leadership, under Elia Sugrañes, succeeding Roberto Pistolesi, faces AI, cooperation and functional claiming as the next phase of technological pressure on the profession.
The circumstances differ. The responsibility does not. Clients still need judgement. They need advisers who can translate technical possibility into legal consequence, and professionals willing to say when a shortcut is unsafe, when a claim is too broad, when a disclosure has caused damage, or when a system's convenience does not serve the applicant.
Every generation thinks its problems are new, and in one sense every generation is right, the tools are new, the pressures are real, the consequences matter. What has not changed is the deeper task: adapting without abandoning the standards that make the profession worth preserving.
This article is part 3 in a 3-part series celebrating 120 years of FICPI.
Part 1: 120 years of the independent IP Attorney: FICPI's constant cause
Part 2: The world gets smaller: building the FICPI family over 120 years