I have received a response to my recent post Reducing Patent Pendency. The following was received from Peter C. Pappas, Chief Communications Officer & Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for Intellectual Property:
I wanted to clarify the USPTO’s pendency goals in response to your recent blog post on this topic. The USPTO’s goal of 10 month average pendency to first action, and 20 month average pendency to final action, are goals that are based on the traditional method of measuring pendency. Under that measurement, total average pendency is currently about 35 months and we intend to reduce that to 20 months on average by 2015. We intend in the next few weeks to launch a dashboard on our website that will provide gages of varying measures of pendency, including pendency numbers that will enable the public to measure pendency time inclusive of RCE’s. As we have also said, we have set a separate goal of 12 months pendency to final action for those applicants who want it, and will be making an announcement on that in the coming weeks.
That is great that the PTO has plans to launch a new dashboard for calculating pendency and that it is working on reducing pendency in the coming weeks and months.
The PTO has apparently backed away from Secretary Locke’s written statement to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee where he indicated that the PTO’s $2.3 billion budget request would “put the agency on a path to reduce first action pendency to 10 months and total pendency for patent applications to 20 months.”
Mr. Pappas’s statement is that the goals are based on “traditional methods” of measuring pendency. In other words, we still won’t have information on true patent pendency. Just because the PTO has traditionally measured total pendency incorrectly, doesn’t mean it should continue to do so. Director Kappos has indicated that he understands total pendency to be from first priority application to issuance or total and complete abandonment with no continuations, divisionals, RCEs, CIPs, etc. Pages 90-92 of this PPAC transcript. That is what total pendency means. The PTO needs to use that information to be more transparent in pendency numbers. At a minimum, they need to take RCEs into account. The current numbers are simply misleading.
Don’t get me wrong, the PTO can do a lot of things to reduce pendency. Anything they do to reduce it will be helpful.
