## When allowance does not equal patent A patent application getting allowed does not always mean a patent will result. The most common alternatives, discussed in Lies, Damned Lies, and Examiner Statistics are: (1)… --- ## How Often Do Patent Applications Get Rejected? “How often do patent applications get rejected?” This is probably one of the most common questions I get asked from clients unfamiliar with the patent… --- ## IBM vs. The USPTO: Some Patent Prosecution Visualizations I recently contributed some data to the “Inside the IBM Patent Factory” on IAM-Media. Check it out here (paywall). As part of that research,… --- ## How Fast are Continuations? As I wrote last week in Breaking the Seal, when presented with allowable claims that aren’t perfect, I often take the claims (that is, allow… --- ## Breaking the Seal (Statistics on Continuations and Divisionals) Today I am looking at statistics on continuing applications. This post was motivated by two questions that I wanted to explore: Question 1: Should I take… --- ## Design Patent Rejections – Update Foreword: To date, the BigPatentData Blog has given little no attention to design patents. This is because I barely know the difference between a design patent and… --- ## To AP.B or Not To AP.B? (Act II) In the first post of this series, we saw that, overall, allowance rate goes down with each appeal. That seems to intuitively make sense because,… --- ## Prosecution Poker with Appeal and Pre-Appeal Statistics (updated April 2019) In my previous post, I looked at two metrics – allowance rate and actions per disposal – that I find useful in assessing an examiner… --- ## The Easiest and Most Difficult Patent Examiners – Allowance Rate and Actions per Disposal (Updated March 2019) How often do you get 5 minutes into an office action and you start thinking “here we go again, another idiot patent examiner that has… --- ## To AP.B or Not To AP.B? That is the Question. (Part 1) For us patent prosecutors, whether to file an appeal brief or an RCE is a decision we have to make more often than soup or…