Staying current was never meant to be a second job.
You qualified to practise, not to spend evenings scrolling the Official Journal or reading outdated commentaries. Yet the EPC shifts, the UPC hands down rulings weekly, and fees change. Being the one who missed it is not an option.
Understanding the law once was never the challenge. Keeping up with the decisions that keep interpreting it is.
The information is all there, spread across hundreds of pages of Guidelines, decisions, and fee tables. What is missing is the time to pull it together.
And something is at stake: clients trust the hard call to those who reliably stay current.
For deadlines, there is docketing. For case law, there is Rhein-IP.
Deadlines in most firms are watched by docketing software you trust. For case law, there is no equally established counterpart.
Staying current usually means working through journals and commentaries as often as time allows. Yet an overlooked decision can be just as consequential as a missed deadline.
Dr. Mark Hendrik Standke
Physicist · Software engineer · Patent attorney candidate (Amtsjahr, DPMA)
Dr. Mark Standke is a physicist, software engineer, and patent attorney candidate. He has worked in patent practice in Cologne since 2019, has been at the German Patent and Trade Mark Office for the Amtsjahr since 2026, and qualifies as European Patent Attorney and German Patentanwalt in 2027.
The idea for Rhein-IP grew out of that practice. New EPO and UPC decisions had to be read and digested anyway, for the daily work and for the qualification ahead. So he wrote software that takes over the tracking, at first just for his own desk.
Today that has become Rhein-IP. New decisions are summarised on the blog in plain language. The newsletter reports the most important ones. Live-Commentary answers questions in seconds and backs every answer with the primary source. New decisions are typically available there within 24 hours of online publication. The fee calculator works with the official EPO schedule and is updated daily.
Fast to find, reliably sourced, always current.
What this gives you
With Rhein-IP you find information fast and get trustworthy answers you can quickly verify yourself, because they always link to the current primary sources. Vaguely remember that decision on topic X, what number was it again? You find decisions like that with Live Commentary, easily, using natural language as your search query.
Publicly available
Rhein-IP is developed for the public. The commit history of recent years on this and other projects is visible on GitHub.
448 contributions in the last year
@MarrksonWhere this is going
The classical commentary is a book. It appears in editions, often years apart, and so it trails the current case law. Rhein-IP works continuously. New EPO and UPC decisions are reviewed and are typically available in Live-Commentary within hours of online publication. Every statement is linked to its primary source. The newsletter delivers the most important changes straight to your inbox. Rhein-IP is meant to become the modern commentary on the EPC and the UPC.
Use Rhein-IP to stay reliably current on the EPC and the UPC.
The newsletter serves you best. It brings the latest decisions to your inbox before you have to look for them. For the questions in between there is Live-Commentary. It answers in seconds, backs every answer with the primary source, and typically knows the latest decisions within 24 hours of publication.
Fast. Trustworthy. Current.
Disclosures
Rhein-IP is an editorial site. The information on this page does not constitute legal advice, and no client representation is undertaken through this site. Working languages are German and English. Contact via LinkedIn or email.