Person Skilled in the Art

A hypothetical person (also commonly referred to as "the skilled person") used as a legal construct (or fiction) when assessing certain requirements of patentability, such as inventive step and sufficiency of disclosure.

This fictional person is bestowed with the ordinary level of skill in the relevant technical field (the "art") on the date on which the patent (or patent application) being assessed was filed (or was deemed to be filed). They possess the common general knowledge (and prevailing prejudices) of that field as of that date, but lack any inventive capacity.

Being a legal construct, the person skilled in the art is unlikely to reflect the characteristics of anyone actually working in the art, although one English judge asserted that if they were real, they would be very boring - a nerd.

In some cases, where the nature of an invention necessitates it, the person skilled in the art may be considered to be a multidisciplinary team of people having the same characteristics but covering multiple technical fields.