Choosing a European patent attorney: does the Iron Curtain still exist?

It is not the objective of the author to provoke readers, but to share facts and statistics to demonstrate that in over 20 years since the destruction of the ‘Iron Curtain’, more than seven years after the enlargement of the EU and over eight years after most of the former Eastern European countries joined the European Patent Convention (EPC), applicants from the European Patent Convention residing outside the member states predominantly use representatives from the founding countries of the European Patent Convention.