It may be more polite to say we’re operating in “uncertain times,” and boy, are they. But the not-so-polite reality is, we’re in a recession. 

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.

On Sunday, February 24, film fans, pop culture fanatics, and all of Hollywood’s brightest stars will tune in to the live broadcast of the 91st Oscars ceremony. With eight movies nominated for best picture, from the bombastic Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody to the devastatingly poetic Roma, the ceremony is guaranteed to be star-studded, ornate, and maybe even a little unpredictable.

As more and more of our daily life becomes automated, analyzed, and interconnected, people look forward to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) every year to learn about emerging tech and its potential application to everyday life.

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.

Less than six weeks apart, both Apple and Amazon hit major milestones, reaching $1 trillion in valuation. (Apple on August 2, 2018, and Amazon on September 4, 2018.)

These two tech giants, along with Facebook, Netflix, and Google, are often grouped under the acronym “FAANG,” and are synonymous with rapid growth and innovation. As a group, the five companies command over $3 trillion in market capitalization and hold thousands of patents.

But from a patent prosecution perspective, how similar are they? What does FAANG patent prosecution activity tell us about organizations on their way to (and surpassing the) $1 trillion benchmark?

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.

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.

Integration will let users access examiner statistics from within their favorite management software