Time to dive deeper into key trends behind this year’s rankings.

Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot owner PSA Group recently announced the terms of a $48 billion merger that would create the world's fourth-largest automaker. A primary reason for the merger is to share the cost of developing electric and autonomous vehicles.

Pfizer and Mylan, the maker of EpiPens, are merging. Pfizer will offload Upjohn, its portfolio of drugs that are no longer protected by patents, including Viagra, Lipitor and Celebrex, combining with rival Mylan to create a new company that will have a new, yet-to-be-announced name.

Since June of 2014, Alice has become one of the most feared names in patent prosecution. Rejections citing Alice have multiplied exponentially since then, and they now account for more than 60% of §101 rejections and more than 8% of all rejections, as of our latest analysis. 

But Alice rejections aren’t necessarily fatal to an application – and we found the firms to prove it. Which firms are the best at overcoming Alice rejections and getting to an NOA? Read on to find out.

Back in 2016, we looked at the Fastest Growing Patent Law Firms, or as we called them, "The Rainmaker Firms." Now two years later, we want to get a fresh look at which law firms are the fastest growing in terms of patent filings with the USPTO.

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 rarely take a step back to evaluate the general trends at work across the entire USPTO. Now, we'll pull back the curtain to reveal a few USPTO-wide prosecution trends.  

This page is intended to be a general resource for patent prosecutors to use to get a bird's-eye view of the state of patent prosecution trends across the USPO. 

Check back often, as we will periodically update this information and add new charts and graphs to bring you even more groundbreaking insights.

When we think about the technologies that have changed the face of the world and built the modern era, it is impossible to forget or ignore the role of the automotive industry. The automotive industry and the broader sector that it supports defined more than two generations of economic prosperity and mobility in the United States. The automobile in many ways marked the maturity of the industrial age and has since made an indelible mark on our culture and everyday life.

In Part I of our Using Juristat's Examiner Reports series, we explained how understanding an examiner's key metrics can help you estimate expense, allocate resources, and manage client expectations. In this post, we'll take a closer look at responding to office actions, including interviews, appeals, and the effects of filing a continuation or continuation-in-part. 

Our Patent Examiner Reports give attorneys, agents, and in-house teams nearly limitless advantages over the competition. Every time you open an Examiner Report, our system performs over a billion calculations to return the most up-to-date information. As of this writing,

Juristat’s database covers approximately 9,000 active examiners in almost 900 art units. Not only that, we have data on nearly 8 million patent applications.

In this series of posts, we will go step-by-step through an Examiner Report and demonstrate just how useful Juristat can be.

As part of our ongoing effort to uncover the firms that perform the best using various key metrics of skill in patent prosecution (allowance rate, speed to disposition, number of claims lost, etc.), we wanted to rank some of the most efficient law firms for patent prosecution. Now, there are several methods for measuring "efficiency" in patent prosecution, the most obvious being average speed to disposition and average number of office actions. We have previously ranked the speediest firms in several technology centers (here, here, and here), but we have not yet ranked firms using average number of office actions as an indicator of overall efficiency. Below are the top 10 firms that receive the fewest office actions. They are ranked by the average number of office actions they received between publication and disposition for all utility patent applications disposed between January 1, 2005 and March 31, 2016. In order to achieve the most accurate sample sizes, we limited the pool of eligible firms to those that had disposed of at least 5,000 applications during the relevant time frame.