Patent Office unveils plans to improve its operations

The Patent and Trademark Office on Friday announced three initiatives aimed at improving both the speed of its operations and soundness of its decision-making system.

Officials said the intent is to address the agency's backlog of requests to re-examine patents by revamping the way it handles such requests from patent holders. They also said the office intends to conclude work by the end of this year on all re-examination requests that have been pending for more than two years.

There currently are more than 1,200 such requests, according to statistics provided by PTO. More than 100 of them have been pending in excess of four years, and 420 have been pending for more than two years.

"[For] all the requests that have been with the office for more than two years, we will by the end of the year conclude the processing by the examiner," Joseph Rolla, the deputy commissioner for patent-examination policy, said in an interview about the initiatives.

PTO Director Jon Dudas was scheduled to make the announcement in Chicago on Friday at a town-hall meeting on patent reform convened by the FTC, National Academy of Sciences and American Intellectual Property Law Association.

Rolla said PTO also is implementing a new system for such re-examination requests. Instead of a single examiner handling the cases, the requests from patent holders will be handled by a panel of three examiners. The new process took effect Friday.

"It's intended to both speed up the process and improve the effectiveness of the re-examination process," he said.

PTO also is changing its process for appealing rejected patents in order to help applicants save money. Currently, companies must file detailed briefs with PTO's examiners, who they then meet with before the appeals are processed by PTO's Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences. PTO has found that 60 percent of such appeals currently end at that conference stage. The compilation of the appeal briefs can cost between $5,000 and $15,000.

The new system will require fewer details and shorter briefs, Rolla said. He added that PTO will work to implement the procedure in "the near term." Separately, PTO intends to ask for public comment this summer on the kinds of information that its examiners should consult when granting patent applications. The legal and technology communities historically have criticized examiners for not doing more research in academic journals before granting patent applications.