U.S. Patents to Foreign Inventors

There seems to be a fair amount of concern, or at least discussion, lately about how many patents are being filed in and by the…

Did Alice bring more 102, 103, and 112 rejections?

Like a moth to a flame, this week I was again drawn to the USPTO Office Actions data set. Although, I previously found that coverage…

Are U.S. Patent Filings Plummeting Due to Eligibility Uncertainty?

As I mentioned in my last post, many believe the reason allowance rates remain high in the face of subject matter eligibility carnage is that applicants…

Another Look at the USPTO Office Actions Dataset

Last week I posted a bunch of stats about 101 rejections in the age of Alice and Mayo. The data I presented suggested that, for…

Mayo and Alice Had Little Impact on Prosecution (Except for a Few Art Units)

Patentlyo.com recently published a great article from Colleen Chien about the impact of subject matter eligibility rejections on patent prosecution. Here’s a recent analysis I…

Final Rejection and Allowance Statistics (The 0-Fer Club)

Eli Mazour was wondering how many examiners have not allowed any applications this year. Since he has a cool podcast (with an impressive list of past guests),…

After Final Consideration Pilot Amendments: Do “Difficult” Examiners Routinely Dismiss Them?

As I touched on last week, for the ~80% of After Final Consideration Pilot 2.0 (AFCP) requests that are coded in PAIR, the amendments were…

AFCP 2.0 Has Been Extended, But Should You use It?

Update April 2019: You can now lookup your examiner’s AFCP stats in BigPatentData Examiner Analytics. The After Final Consideration Pilot Program (AFCP) 2.0 has again…

When I said “Proceed to Appeal” What I Meant Was . . .

I have previously posted on what happens after an appeal brief (here and here) and what happens after a pre-appeal conference decision of “proceed to…

Never Give Up? (The 15 Applications with Most Non-final Rejections)

I am dealing with jet lag after 2 weeks in Russia (Putin says hi), plus there is a lot going on with the IPO annual…