patents
National filings, Paris priority, and confirmatory patents for foreign grants — treated as a listed country, not an afterthought.
Nepal is a member of the Paris Convention and of WIPO. It is not a contracting party to the Patent Cooperation Treaty. There is no PCT national phase into Kathmandu. If Nepal matters, it needs its own application at the Department of Industry.
A PCT application does not enter Nepal on its own. The diary must be set as if this were any other listed national filing.
In-house teams and foreign attorneys who run large PCT programmes sometimes put Nepal in the same mental box as other South Asian filings. That is a mistake. The PCT is a filing and search system among contracting states. Nepal is not one of them. You cannot “enter national phase” here at month thirty. You file nationally, or you use a confirmatory route where a foreign grant already exists and the statute allows it.
That does not make Nepal exotic. It makes it ordinary in an older way: a Paris country with a local office, a local Act, and a local examination practice. The cost of forgetting it is a hole in the map — and, if a competitor files first, a hole that is expensive to close.
A first filing elsewhere can often support a Paris priority claim into Nepal, provided the Nepali application is still in time. For patents that window is twelve months from the first filing. That clock is unforgiving. Foreign counsel and local counsel should treat Nepal as a listed country on the same sheet as any other national filing, not as something that can ride on a PCT automatically.
If the twelve months have passed, the question is no longer priority. It is whether a later national filing is still useful — novelty, commercial need, and whether a confirmatory path is open. Those are strategy questions. They are not solved by filing a form “to be safe” without reading the foreign history.
Put the first-filing date in the first line of the instruction. The rest of the specification can follow in the same pack.
Where a patent has already been granted abroad, Nepali law also allows a confirmatory route. Whether that is the better path than a fresh national application depends on the foreign grant, the claims, and what the client actually needs to stop or license in Nepal. A confirmatory filing is not a photocopy exercise. The foreign grant still has to be capable of supporting a local right that the Department and, later, a court can read.
Instructing attorneys should send the granted claims, the priority chain, and a plain statement of why Nepal is on the list: manufacturing, import, a local partner, or a competitor already selling here. The answer to “national or confirmatory?” follows from that, not from habit.
Novelty and the local examination practice should be checked against Nepali statute and Department practice, not assumed to match the EPO or USPTO. What was allowed in a European grant may still be the right starting point; it is not a guarantee of the same claim scope in Kathmandu. Term and renewal also follow local rules — including renewals after grant — so a grant is the start of maintenance, not the end of the file.
Translations, drawings, and the power of attorney should be in a condition the Department can actually examine. A specification that is elegant in English and unreadable as filed is not a specification.
The practical advice is simple: decide early whether Nepal is in the filing map, diary the Paris deadline, and instruct local counsel with the specification, claims, and foreign filing details in one pack. Status reports should come back with the diary visible: what was filed, what is likely to be asked, and what the client must decide now.
If the invention is already in the Nepali market, or a competitor’s product is, say so. Enforcement is a different note —Enforcing IP rights in Nepal— but it changes whether the first task is a filing or a letter.
General information only. Patent strategy turns on the invention and the foreign filing history; this note is not an opinion on patentability.