In civil-law countries, employers must pay a value-based 'reasonable remuneration' to employee inventors. When dissatisfied with the amount of compensation, employee inventors can ask for a review by an independent board or directly in court and claim additional remuneration. The study explores the existence of ex-ante indicators that would help distinguish inventors entitled to higher/lower additional compensation. We build on the patent quality framework and test the explanatory power of the ex-ante patent value indicator, the patent family size, on the additional rewards awarded to employee inventors. A novel dataset of court cases heard between 1981 and 2017 in three civil-law countries (Germany, France, and Japan) is used. Our findings indicate a consistently positive effect of both simple and GDP-weighted patent family indicators on the additional remuneration granted. The main finding is as follows: if the court grants positive additional compensation, we observe an average 68% increase in compensation when the number of countries covered by the patent doubles; alternatively, if the total GDP of the countries covered by the patent doubles, the compensation increases by app. 59%. These findings, along with others from the study, can be beneficial for R&D managers, intellectual property managers, and other executives, as well as innovative employees, in estimating the remuneration amount for employee inventions.

在大陆法系国家，雇主必须向雇员发明人支付基于价值的“合理报酬”。当雇员发明人对赔偿金额不满意时，可以要求独立委员会或直接向法院进行审查，并要求额外报酬。该研究探讨了事前指标的存在，这些指标将有助于区分有权获得更高/更低额外补偿的发明人。我们建立在专利质量框架的基础上，测试了事前专利价值指标、专利家族规模以及授予员工发明人的额外奖励的解释力。使用了 1981 年至 2017 年间在三个大陆法系国家（德国、法国和日本）审理的法庭案件的新颖数据集。我们的研究结果表明，简单专利族指标和 GDP 加权专利族指标对授予的额外报酬始终产生积极影响。主要发现如下：如果法院给予积极的额外赔偿，我们观察到当专利覆盖的国家数量增加一倍时，赔偿平均增加 68%；或者，如果专利所覆盖国家的 GDP 总量增加一倍，则补偿金额将增加 app。 59%。这些发现以及研究中的其他发现对于研发经理、知识产权经理和其他高管以及创新员工在估算员工发明的薪酬金额时可能是有益的。