date. It was for a new automated method of acquiring the documents necessary to incorporate a company. It involved a user sitting at a computer and communicating with a remote server, answering questions. By posing questions to the user in a number of stages, enough information was gleaned from the user's answers to produce the required documents. Questions posed in the second and subsequent stages were determined from previous answers provided and the user's answers were stored in a database structure. This process was repeated until the user had provided enough information to allow the documents legally required to create the corporate entity to be generated. A number of document templates were also stored and the data processor was configured to merge at least one of these templates with the user's answers to generate the required legal documents. The documents could then be sent to the user in an electronic form for the user to print out and submit, mailed to the user, or submitted to the appropriate registration authority on behalf of the user. The UK patent office did find that Macrossan's process was both novel and involved an inventive step, but nonetheless rejected the application for a patent since the claimed subject matter was not patentable subject matter under UK patent law. The UK patent examiner found that the claims related to a method for doing business and a computer program as such. Macrossan sought a review of the patent examiner's finding, by way of a hearing before a UKPO hearing officer - she held that the application related to a computer program as such, a method for doing business as such, and a method for performing a mental act as such, and thus was excluded from patentability on each of those three grounds. High Court Macrossan then appealed to the High Court. The High Court concurred in finding that the application related to a computer program as such, and to a method for performing a mental act as such and was unpatentable for each of those two reasons. However, the High Court specifically overruled the UKPO hearing officer on one of the three grounds of exclusion, by holding that the application did not relate to a method of doing business as such. Judgment The judgment approved a new four-step test to be used when assessing whether or not an application actually describes an invention. The four-step test