Passage of the America Invents Act in late 2011 allowed the PTO to proceed with its earlier announced plan for prioritized examination. For payment of a rather large fee and several other requirements, an applicant can get a final PTO determination of patentability of his application in about a year. New Commissioner for Patents Peggy Focarino provided some information on the status of the program in a post on the Director’s blog several weeks ago. The information she provides is through the end of 2011.
As of that date, 1,694 petitions had been filed. The PTO took an average of 40.8 days to process the applications from petition to completion of the pre-examination phase. This compares favorably with the 69.6 days required for a standard application; the office, however, is working to cut down on this time. Of the petitions filed, 1,231 had been decided by the end of the year, with 1,218 being granted (98.9%).
First office actions have been issued in 648 of these applications an average of 30.7 days after approval of the petition, or 66.4 days after filing of the petition. The PTO goal is 3 months from petition filing; they have met this in every case.
Notices of Allowance have been mailed in 23 applications, an average of 39.2 days after petition approval. Final rejections have been mailed in 3 applications, an average of 34.3 days after petition approval.
For those applicants or practitioners concerned about whether Track I applications will be treated differently from others in terms of grant/denial rate, our examiners are being given exactly the same training, credits and incentives to accurately examine Track I cases as for all other cases, and no training, credits or incentives are being given to bias examiner decisions in any way. And as for the data, given the statistics provided above, so far there is no basis to believe there is any difference in result for Track I versus non-Track I processing, other than the significantly faster responsiveness.
So far, the PTO is performing admirably in its prioritized examination applications, easily beating the one year goal to final action. The first patent issued under the program was filed Sept. 30, 2011 and issued Jan. 10, 2012, just 103 days (U.S. Patent No. 8,094,942 to Google). The program is limited to 10,000 prioritized application during FY2012. It will be interesting to see if the numbers for “regular” applications is affected by the program.
For applicants who need a quick decision on an application and have the money to participate, accelerated examination appears to be a great option so far.
