Hendrik Johannes Liebenberg, who worked as a Patent Examiner from October 2012 until May 2024, has applied to the Federal Court of Australia for writs of certiorari and mandamus following unsuccessful FWC proceedings. His case centres on allegations that routine quality assurance procedures at IP Australia constituted improper interference with his decision-making authority. He has, additionally, escalated these claims into broader accusations about institutional practices.
For readers unfamiliar with the legal terminology, a writ of certiorari commands an inferior court or tribunal to set aside a decision, and is typically used when the decision-maker has exceeded their jurisdiction or made a jurisdictional error. A writ of mandamus compels a public official or body to perform a duty they are legally required to perform, or to exercise their jurisdiction according to law. Both are supervisory remedies allowing superior courts to oversee the exercise of power by decision-makers.
While it is more usual for the Federal Court to review administrative decision under the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1977, the difficulty for Mr Liebenberg is this case is that paragraph (a) of Schedule 1 to the ADJR Act excludes decisions made under employment-related legislation – including the Fair Work Act – from review. This exclusion reflects Parliament's intention that Fair Work matters should be resolved within the specialist tribunal system rather than through general administrative law review. To succeed, therefore, Mr Liebenberg will need to show that the FWC fundamentally misunderstood its jurisdiction, not just that it made errors within its jurisdiction.
The case provides a window into workplace dynamics at Australia’s primary intellectual property agency, though the FWC found no merit in the constructive dismissal claim after examining the circumstances of Mr Liebenberg's resignation.
At the time of writing, there are 26,111 patent applications pending and not yet accepted (i.e. awaiting examination, or under examination) at the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (IPONZ). Of these, 26,029 are subject to the provisions of the current law, the 
Today, something a little different for this blog. As many readers are aware, for the past couple of years I have been working towards a PhD in which, very broadly speaking, I have been looking at applying machine learning, AI and language models to the analysis of patent claims (in particular, to assessing the scope of claims). Most recently, I have been exploring how it might be possible to apply large language models – the types of AI behind popular chat services such as Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude (my personal chatbot of choice), Meta’s LLaMa and (yes) Chinese newcomer DeepSeek – to this task. To experiment with ‘open source’ (
My latest analysis of patent filing data for 2024 confirms a shift that has been years in the making – Chinese applicants have finally overtaken Australian residents to become the second largest source of patent applications, behind only the United States. This milestone comes as US filings showed a notable decline of 5.7%, while Chinese applications continued their steady growth with a 7.2% increase over the previous year.
