When the After Final Consideration Pilot Program 2.0 (“AFCP 2.0”) first launched in May of 2013, the program was lauded by both patent practitioners and USPTO officials as an effective tool to reduce pendency by advancing prosecution while reducing the number of Requests for Continued Examination (RCE’s). Since then, the USPTO has renewed the program multiple times and is still active. Essentially, the program provides another bite of the apple for the applicant by giving some time for the patent examiner to consider additional claim amendments after prosecution has closed without charging the applicant any additional fees. However, many patent practitioners today are finding little value in the program. Is AFCP 2.0 beneficial for advancing prosecution without filing an RCE? As a former primary examiner with ten years at the USPTO, I have a unique insight into the program and how it should be properly utilized.
In Part I of this article, we examined the top three rejections for design patent applications, which are due to non-enablement, inconsistency, and ambiguousness. The fourth most common reason for rejection of design patents is for objections to the drawing disclosure, which we will discuss here. Objections to the drawings occur when something is incorrectly shown in the drawings, but the drawings are still understood by the Examiner. In the stereo receiver example above, if the bottom plan view was present in the original disclosure but the front elevational view did not show shading on the feet, the Examiner would likely issue an objection, stating that shading was not shown on the front surface of the feet and should be. (If the bottom plan view was not part of the originally filed drawings, then the Examiner would be issuing a Sec. 112 rejection instead of merely an objection since there’s not enough information to understand the shape of the feet and the feet will have to be disclaimed by converting them to broken lines.) Objections to the drawings are usually easy to overcome, but they still must be overcome by submitting replacement sheets. This decreases the efficiency of your operation and increases client costs, so objections are important to minimize by carefully reviewing your drawings before submission.
Several weeks ago, in a non-precedential opinion, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a decision in In re: David Tropp, which vacated and remanded a decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). The PTAB decision had affirmed an examiner’s rejection of a patent application covering a luggage inspection technology. The Federal Circuit panel of Chief Judge Sharon Prost and Circuit Judges Raymond Clevenger and Kimberly Moore determined the PTAB erred in its written description analysis by failing to consider all of the language of the specification as filed when determining whether there was sufficient support for the claimed invention. “Even if it is new matter, the language in the ’233 application as filed is relevant to assessing compliance with the written description requirement,” Judge Moore wrote. “The Board’s failure to consider this language was erroneous.”
According to statistics provided by the USPTO, since the beginning of fiscal year 2012, the Office has received a total of only 1,584 third-party submissions of prior art for consideration by patent examiners. The high water mark occurred in 2016, when the office received a total of 329 third-party prior art submissions. This declined to 266 submissions in 2017 and in fiscal year 2018, the USPTO received a total of only 141 prior art submissions.
In an ideal world, your chance of getting a patent allowed is based on the merits of your patent application and independent of the largely random assignment of the patent examiner. As any patent attorney knows, however, this is not the case. Some examiners allow patents too easily and others seem predisposed against allowing any patents at all… The patent application grant rate across the USPTO is 66%. One would expect that a distribution of examiner grant rates would follow a bell-like curve with a reasonably small standard deviation, but that is not what the data shows.