How Often Does the EUIPO Board of Appeal Reverse a Design Invalidity Decision?

First-instance invalidity at the EUIPO is broadly applicant-favourable — about 69% of decisions on the merits invalidate the design. On appeal the picture changes. Across the 2018–2026 corpus, the Board of Appeal reverses the first instance, in whole or part, in just under a quarter of substantive design appeals — and how often it does depends, to a surprising degree, on who leads the panel.

Roughly one in four — but not evenly

Each Board of Appeal decision is led by a named rapporteur — the member who studies the file and drafts the decision. Against the Board-wide reversal rate of about 24%, the busiest rapporteurs diverge sharply. At one end, a rapporteur with nearly 190 substantive appeals reverses the first instance more than half the time; at the other, a rapporteur with a comparable caseload reverses about one in fifty. That is roughly a 27-fold difference in the odds of a reversal depending on who holds the pen — with the per-rapporteur figures, by name, in the analytics.

Before a Board of Appeal panel, the most predictive fact may not be your grounds — it may be which rapporteur drew the file.

Why this matters more after the reform

The EU Design Reform front-loads invalidity: from 1 July 2026, applicants must put their reasoned case and evidence in at the outset, and a fast-track stream handles uncontested novelty and individual-character actions. As more is decided — and decided faster — at first instance, the appeal becomes the considered second look, and its odds become a sharper input into whether to bring or defend one. A 24% base rate, and the wide rapporteur spread underneath it, is exactly the kind of figure that should inform that call.

What the spread is, and is not

A high reversal rate is not, by itself, evidence that a rapporteur is lenient or “applicant-friendly.” Rapporteurs do not draw random files; a member assigned harder or more marginal first-instance decisions will reverse more often for entirely principled reasons. The point is narrower: the variation is large, real, computed only from published outcomes by named officials of an EU agency, and worth pricing in rather than ignoring. It is analysis of public decisions, not a prediction about any case, and not legal advice.

The full table — every rapporteur, caseload, and reversal rate against the Board average, each linking back to the underlying decisions — is in the rapporteur analytics.