Changes will mark the first updates to standards in nearly 25 years
WASHINGTON – Management at the United States Patent and Trademark Office has been working with representatives of the patent examiners union, the Patent Office Professional Association (POPA), to better align the performance standards for patent examiners with the USPTO’s goals for increasing quality in patent examination and reducing the backlog of pending patent applications, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO David Kappos announced today. If adopted, the joint task force’s changes would be the first major revision to the patent examiners’ performance appraisal plan (PAP) since 1986.
“The changes identified by the joint task force will better align examiner goals with those of the agency, better define expectations and measures for success, and encourage mentoring and training – all while ensuring transparency and clarity,” Kappos said. “Along with recent changes to the examiner count system and the revised PAP for supervisory patent examiners, I believe this is an important step forward that will help create a foundation for future USPTO success.”
“Where other efforts to revise the examiner PAP over the past quarter century have failed, this effort has been successful because management was willing to include POPA in the process,” said POPA President Robert Budens. “This spirit of cooperation has helped to create a new PAP that we feel is beneficial to the examiner while also setting the agency on a more direct path to shorten pendency while maintaining high quality examination.”
Some of the proposed changes to the Performance Appraisal Plan (PAP) include:
- Establishing a “Stakeholder Interaction” element that emphasizes routine use of interviews to facilitate compact prosecution and timely responsiveness to requests for personal interviews;
- Revising the performance standards to include a single quality element for all examiners—increasing the focus on examination quality and improve the transparency of how quality is measured; and
- Revamping the workflow element to provide examiners more opportunities to use their professional discretion to manage their own workflow.
POPA’s leadership is now sending the revised performance standards to its members for a vote, which is expected to be held in July. If approved, the new performance standards could be implemented as soon as the 2011 fiscal year.
More specifics on the proposed changes will be available in the coming weeks.
For non-press inquiries, contact Andrew Faile by e-mail, Andrew.Faile (at) uspto.gov.
Join the Discussion
4 comments so far.
Blind Dogma
June 26, 2010 10:29 amAny updates on this out there? Any examiners willing to share insights?
Gena777
June 22, 2010 09:53 pmGood news that Kappos is turning an eye toward patent quality, as well as quantity. Lately the Europeans have been smugly publicizing their superiority in the quality department:
http://www.ipjur.com/blog2/index.php?/archives/157-Mr-Bruno-van-Pottelsberghe-de-la-Potterie-on-The-Quality-Factor-in-Patent-Systems.html and
http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2010/06/18/comparative-analysis-shows-us-patent-office-scores-poorly-on-patent-quality/.
We shouldn’t let Europe stay ahead of us in this area.
http://www.generalpatent.com/media/videos/general-patent-gets-results-its-clients
Blind Dogma
June 16, 2010 03:30 pmMr. Boundy,
Do you have a link to this Aharonian Office Action?
David Boundy
June 16, 2010 02:32 pmAre the new standards available to the public? (This is one of the classes of things that the PTO doesn’t have to make public, so it’s OK that they didn’t, but…)
Do they include a “quality of rejection” component? For example, this morning Aharonian circulated an Office Action that raises a § 112 ¶ 2 indefiniteness rejection of the word “comprising.” Assuming that Aharonian’s report is genuine, examiners should have a substantial disincentive for this kind of baloney (and the SPE/primary that signed this should have a bigger disincentive). Similarly, examiners should get substantial dings if they fail to answer all material traversed — that’s the single thing that most impedes forward progress.