Add new comment

Luck/Unluck of the Draw: An Empirical Study of Examiner Allowance Rates

  • August 29, 2012
  • Stan. Tech. L. Rev. 10
Sean Tu

The United States Patent and Trademark Office is tasked with reading and reviewing patent applications to determine those applications which qualify for patent protection. Each application is reviewed by a specific patent examiner who should apply the standards of patentability in an even, fair, unbiased and consistent manner. This task requires the examiner not only to be internally consistent with the applications she reviews, but consistent with the behavior of other examiners within the same art unit. I find this may not be the case. I find two distinct populations of examiners that may be harming the patent system. The first population may be acting as a “rubber stamp” by allowing patents with little to no review and/or amendments to the claims. In contrast, the second population may be rejecting too many “good” applications that meet the patentability standards. In this article, I argue that the incentive system may play a role in creating these two distinct populations of examiners. Additionally, I propose a holistic pre-grant prosecution history review of both low and high allowance rate examiners to ensure a more consistent application of patentability rules.

Filtered HTML

  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <blockquote> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.