An Overview of Patent Prosecution Trends at the USPTO Since the Year 2000

Since the year 2000, there have been major shifts in law, policy, and the technological landscape that have had profound impacts on patent prosecution practice at the USPTO. Although we often focus our analytics on small corners of the USPTO, such as individual industries, art unit groups, and practice entities, we...

Over the past year, we have published articles covering a wide range of topics, from handling Alice rejections to a study of the ATF industries to the Juristat Top 100. In each of them, we have tried to lift the curtain on the inner workings of the USPTO and various industry players in order to give you, our readers, a more informed outlook on the practice of patent prosecution. Of course,...

One of the biggest questions every client wants to know is “how long will patent prosecution take?” A corollary to that question is “how much will it cost?” The most honest answer is that every prosecution is different and each application involves its own unique set of circumstances. However, one thing is certain--every office action and response thereto extends an application’s prosecution...

In July of 2016, we published an article titled “The Most Difficult Examiners at the USPTO,” in which we identified the top 10 patent examiners across all art units whose allowance rates were the lowest. For most patent prosecutors, their examiner’s allowance rate is the clearest indicator of the overall difficulty of prosecuting a patent with that examiner, since a low allowance rate means that...

ELIGIBILITY & METHODOLOGY

Much like the Juristat Top 100, this list is unique in that it considers both volume and performance. Our ranking is based on four key metrics, as measured from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2015. These metrics are:

In the three-plus years since Alice was decided, we’ve seen the case take quite a toll on the viability of patent applications in the software, e-commerce, and business methods art units. In these technologies, allowance rates have plunged, abandonments have skyrocketed, and a general sense of pessimism has pervaded the industry. However, the effects of Alice, while significant for certain tech...

The AFCP 2.0 program was established in 2012 to provide applicants with an alternative to RCEs. The purpose of the program is threefold: 

As precursors to the more wide-ranging Alice decision and the USPTO guidance that came after it, the impacts of the Mayo and Myriad decisions have gotten somewhat lost in the scuffle of all of the attention paid to § 101 rejections in the software and business methods technology sectors. While Mayo and Myriad were limited to patent applications touching on laws of nature, these two cases...

In 2017, big business is all about data. We see it being used in almost every industry, from healthcare, to financial services, to aviation, and beyond. One large industry that has been slow to adapt to the use of data analytics is the legal industry, where statements like “that’s the way we’ve always done it” carry more weight than they do in an industry like, say, healthcare. However, the legal...

Ever since Mayo was decided in 2012, the percentage of § 101 rejections on biotech, pharma, and life sciences applications has been on the rise, from 4.9% before Mayo to 8.6% after Myriad to 15.7% after Alice. A total of about 37% of all § 101 rejections in Technology Center 1600, which handles the bulk of these types of applications, now cite either Mayo or Myriad. This is bad news for...