Examining Patent Examination

Abstract

The USPTO receives more applications today than it ever has before. Whathappens to those applications? Patent prosecutors all have stories andpersonal experiences. Until quite recently, however, this sort of“anecdata” was all that was available, because the law prevented anyonefrom every finding out what happened to patent applications that did notultimately issue as patents.That changed in 2001, when the PTO began publishing data on pendingapplications, and when the PAIR system allowed the public to track the fateof those applications in real time. In this paper, we use those changes toreport – for the first time ever – systematic data on the fate ofapplications in the PTO. We are able to confirm much received wisdom, butalso to offer some surprising results.

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