In T 506/91 the board held that filing requests and deciding if several alternative requests were appropriate or not was a matter that in the end could only be decided by the party concerned and it should be routine for representatives to decide independently how to pursue their cases, including what requests to submit.

The established system of main and auxiliary requests in the proceedings before the EPO provides that parties, when filing alternative sets of claims, must indicate the order of preference for each set of claims (R 14/10, T 1125/13 of 25 June 2015 date: 2015-06-25).