We at Juristat love the holidays and wanted to share with you ten inventions for a very festive season. Happy Holidays to all!

As the home of art units covering software and business methods, TC 3600 has been the focus of heavy attention since the Alice decision in June of last year. Its average allowance rate is 61.2%, which is below the USPTO average of 72%,. Its average speed to disposition is 35.3 months months, bringing it in line with the USPTO average of 35.8 months.  All firms below are ranked by allowance rate. The firms were selected from IP Today's top firms for 2015 and have at least 100 applications disposed in TC 3600. Allowance rate was calculated by dividing the number of a firm's allowed applications by the total number of the firm's allowed and abandoned applications.

Technology Center 1700 covers a broad range of technologies, including diverse fields such as organic chemistry, fuel cells, adhesives, and food. Its average allowance rate is 57.7%, which is quite a bit below the USPTO average of 72%.  Its average speed to disposition is 36.6 months, bringing it very much in line with the USPTO average of 35.8 months. Below are the top 10 fastest firms in TC 1700. All firms were chosen from IP Today's top firms for 2015 and have at least 100 disposed applications in the technology center. The rankings below are based on the average number of months between an application's filing date and the date of its disposition.

TC 2100 handles computer-related applications, including applications touching on data processing, memory, information security, and artificial intelligence. Its overall allowance rate is 66.2%, which is slightly below the USPTO average of 71.3%. In terms of average speed to disposition, it takes an average of 40.6 months to prosecute an application in TC 2100, which is slightly slower than the USPTO average of 35.8 months. Below are the top 10 firms based on allowance rate in TC 2100. All firms were selected from IP Today's top firms for 2015 and have at least 100 disposed applications in the technology center.

IPR challenges arise most often when a party is sued for patent infringement and the defendant files an IPR petition to have the patent, or at least the claims at issue, invalidated. This scenario is the one that most legislators who drafted the America Invents Act had in mind when they established IPR as a quicker and cheaper alternative to federal district court litigation. Kyle Bass, the Dallas-based hedge fund manager and president of Hayman Capital, has found a more creative use for IPR. Hailed by many as a visionary, Bass rose to prominence after predicting several large-scale economic events, including the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. In February of 2015, he announced that his next venture would be a foray into the world of pharmaceutical patents.
Bass’s latest strategy is to file and publicize IPR challenges against pharmaceutical patents, betting that the threat of invalidation will cause the parent company’s stock prices to drop. He then either short sells that company’s stock or invests in other companies that would profit if the patents at issue were invalidated. There is evidence that this strategy works, as Bass’s first IPR challenge against Acorda Therapeutics caused its shares to drop by 9.65%. Because pharmaceutical companies enjoy a 20-year period of market exclusivity while their patents are in force before generics can be sold, drug prices during that period are artificially high. Accusing pharmaceutical companies of holding “BS patents,” Bass believes that invalidating them, or at least causing their stock prices to drop through the threat of invalidation, will result in lower drug prices. To demonstrate this ostensible concern for the consumer, Bass even formed an entity called the “Coalition for Affordable Drugs” to be the petitioner in his IPR challenges. As of the date of publication, Bass has filed 32 such petitions.

On June 19, 2014, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International.  Besides an explosion of bad Alice in Wonderland allusions in the patent law blogosphere, Alice significantly changed the landscape for software patents. Alice makes it significantly more difficult to obtain a patent on software and § 101 rejections have become much more common in the decision's wake. We at Juristat used our database of over 6.8 million patent applications to determine the top 10 firms with the highest success rate in overcoming Alice rejections.  We limited our analysis to firms that have had at least 15 applications that received rejections based on Alice between June 19, 2014 and May 1, 2015.

The America Invents Act of 2011 (AIA) established three new post-grant review proceedings to be administered by the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB): inter partes review (IPR), the transitional post-grant review for covered business method patents (CMB), and post-grant review (PGR). Upon establishment, the AIA also gave the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) broad authority to amend these proceedings. On August 20, 2015, the USPTO officially published its second set of proposed rule changes affecting these three newly established AIA post-grant review proceedings. These proposed rule changes, more broad in scope than the first set of rule changes issued in March 2015 (which largely addressed page limitations and other changes of simple scope), address more substantive issues and aim to address public comments and suggestions received specifically during the USPTO’s listening tour in April and May of 2014 as well as throughout the first several years of the new proceedings.

Assessing the productivity of a law firm is a tricky business, and can be measured in multiple ways, including total number of applications filed, number of attorneys, and number of patents granted, among others.
More than just measuring the total output of a firm, we were interested in measuring the productivity of patent prosecutors (attorneys and agents) inside a firm. Due to employee turnover, measuring this at the firm level is somewhat of a difficult task. However, in an attempt to minimize the influence of turnover, we limited our results to those firms among IP Today’s 2015 top patent firms that had at least 10 prosecutors and we restricted the date range to patents granted within the last 10 years.