Continuing our study of firms that perform above average in several metrics in every technology center at the USPTO, we now turn our attention to the firms that receive the fewest office actions to allowance in TC 1700. As we have stated before, we simply report the facts. A low number of office actions could mean that a firm did not fight for as much claim scope as they could have, or it could mean that the firm was precise and targeted when writing their claims. Either way, fewer office actions generally indicates a more efficient and cheaper prosecution, which is something both firms and their clients can find merit in. 

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We’ve got some exciting new features for you in the latest Examiner Reports release. You can read more about how to use these new features – and Juristat Examiner Reports in general – in our posts on managing client expectations and how Examiner Reports are power tools for patent lawyers. For now, here’s the quick rundown of the new stuff:

Power Tools for Patent Lawyers

We’ve covered a lot of ground on how you can use our reports for strategic planning, but Examiner Reports offer a bevy of powerful tools that let you quickly drill down to the most relevant data for your specific prosecution. In this post, we'll explore how to get the most of Examiner Reports' research by exploiting its interactivity.

With this guide learn the “what” and the “how” of Juristat Examiner Reports: what you can do with them, and how our current customers do it.

As part of our ongoing effort to rank firms according to various methods in every technology center at the USPTO, we now turn our attention to TC 1700. This technology center generally handles chemical and materials engineering, with work groups as diverse as organic chemistry, metallurgy, food, and radiation imagery. Its average allowance rate is 62.7%, which is well below the USPTO average of 71%. Here, we’ve ranked the ten firms with the highest allowance rates in TC 1700. To be eligible for inclusion on this list, each firm must have disposed of at least 500 applications in the technology center in the 10-year period between 2006 and 2015.

As part of our ongoing effort to identify firms that stand out using various metrics in every technology center at the USPTO, we again focus our efforts on TC 1600 this week. As you may recall, we ranked the top firms by allowance rate in a previous blog post titled “The Top Firms for Life Science Patents.” This week, we will uncover the firms that receive the fewest office actions to allowance in TC 1600. 

TC 1600 handles applications generally touching on the life sciences, including plants, organic chemistry, and molecular biology. Its overall allowance rate is 56.7%, which is significantly lower than the USPTO average of 71%. In terms of average speed to disposition, it takes an average of 37.2 months to prosecute an application to allowance. Below are the top 10 fastest firms in TC 1600. The firms below all have had at least 100 applications disposed of in TC 1600 during the 10-year period between 2006 and 2015 and are ranked by the average number of months it takes them to receive a notice of allowance. 

Cyberattack.

The Legal Landscape

The life sciences, especially the biotechnology and organic chemistry sectors, have been particularly affected by the recent spate of § 101 jurisprudence that started with Bilski v. Kappos, 561 U.S. 593 (2010) and ended with Alice Corporation v. CLS Bank, 573 U.S. ___ (2014), although there are still cases dealing with the implications of these decisions working their way through the courts. Before Bilski, the standard test for determining whether a process claim was subject-matter eligible was the machine or transformation test, which held that a claim to a process is patentable if it is implemented on a particular machine or it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing. The Supreme Court stated in Bilski that this is not the sole test for determining patent eligibility, but merely a useful guideline. This decision set off a series of cases touching on the judicial exceptions to § 101 that included Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, 566 U.S. ___ (2012) and Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, 569 U.S. ___ (2013), which dealt with the laws of nature and natural phenomena exceptions.