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.

Technology Center 1600 covers a variety of biotech, chemical, and pharmaceutical technologies, as well as plants and cosmetics. Its overall allowance rate is 51%, which is significantly lower than the USPTO's average of 71%. In terms of speed to disposition, it takes an average of 36.1 months to prosecute an application to disposition in TC 1600, which is nearly equal to the USPTO average of 35.8 months.
Below is a ranking of the top 10 firms by allowance rate among IP Today's top patent firms.*

Juristat is proud to announce the release of some exciting new features that will help law firms compare performance and attract new business. Here’s a breakdown of what to expect:

Latest release will help firms compare performance and attract new clients

ST. LOUIS, MO – September 1, 2015 – Juristat, the legal technology company known for its industry-leading Patent Examiner Reports, today announced the release of a new suite of products that will help law firms compare performance and attract new business.

Introduction

Obtaining a utility patent is not always an easy task. In order to do so, an inventor, normally assisted by a patent attorney, must demonstrate to the USPTO that a particular invention is worthy of a patent.

The USPTO evaluates worthiness using a strict set of patentability requirements aimed at ensuring that granted patents encourage innovation and productivity.

The five major patentability requirements are (1) subject matter, (2) utility, (3) novelty, (4) non-obviousness, and (5) the writing requirements. We will address of each of these criteria in turn.

We are constantly thinking about all the factors that affect a patent application. We’ve even analyzed gender bias at the USPTO (check back soon for those results). Every detail matters, perhaps even the length of an application’s title. That’s why we decided to test the following hypothesis: a longer application title results in a longer wait until first exam.

Here at Juristat, we are often asked whether an entity's size affects its allowance rate for patents. We’ve run the numbers, and the results may be more skewed than you expect.

The USPTO has issued new guidance on subject matter eligibility under § 101. The document, entitled “2014 Interim Guidance on Patent Subject Matter Eligibility” (Interim Eligibility Guidance), comes in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decisions in Mayo, Myriad, and Alice Corp. that have shaken up the way patent examiners determine if an idea is patentable. Prior to the Interim Eligibility Guidance's release on December 15th, patent examiners relied primarily on two documents released earlier this year: (1) the Myriad/Mayo guidance issued on March 4th; and (2) the Alice Corp. guidance issued on June 25th. The new document supplements the latter and supersedes the former.

At Juristat, we use big data analytics to help patent lawyers predict the future. As of the Summer of 2014, our dataset includes over 5.5 million U.S. patent applications, with some applications dating back to the early 1900s. Each patent application is made up of a series of interrelated documents stored in tsv or xml formats. Further, patent applications can be connected to other applications through parent-child relationships. Unlike most big data projects with large constantly streaming data feeds, the patent system moves at a glacial pace, with an average application receiving an new event once every few months. We’ve begun the transition from our existing MySQL database system to a NoSQL document store, and based on our needs  we considered MongoDB and RethinkDB as potential solutions. Below are the findings of our benchmarking and testing