Posts Tagged: "pli"

The Patent Bar Exam: Everything You Need to Know

The patent bar exam is a multiple-choice examination made up of 100 questions. You will be given 3 hours to complete the first 50 questions and another 3 hours to complete the second 50 questions. The exam is on-demand and can be taken any time. The patent bar exam has recently been updated effective August 16, 2018, and the exam can be expected to be updated every year at least once. Thus, the patent bar exam has become a moving target. While it does not wildly shift overnight, or change in unannounced ways, gone are the days the exam would remain the same for many years.

Reflections of the Patent Bar Exam

Recently I took and passed, on my second attempt, the United States Patent & Trademark Office Registration (bar) Exam. It is a daunting experience but manageable with some occasional misery in the mix. The exam is offered once a year in Virginia on paper otherwise you schedule your own computer exam at a Prometric testing site. The total time needed to prepare for the exam is about 150 hours of solid study/course time. It is a hundred questions divided into two three-hour sessions with an hour break.

Easing the Standard for Recovering Attorney Fees in Patent Cases

I think that the Supreme Court decision will be enough to prevent the so-called “patent reform” from gaining any traction in the Senate. The cynical view is that there is so much lobbying money flowing why would Congress want to turn that spigot off when it could easily flow into the next Congressional term? Further, there has been a growing and steady effort by those opposed to the pending patent legislation. Opponents were already making their case heard as the Senate continued to time after time postpone dissemination of the Manager’s Amendment, signaling the consensus that some Senators desperately wanted to reach was illusive, if not impossible. Now with the Supreme Court decisions in these two cases those on the Hill who were already skeptical have more than enough ammunition to slam on the brakes, at least for now, to see what the ultimate ramifications of the decisions will be on the reality of patent litigation.

The PTAB Roadblock to Patent Monetization

The “new normal” created by the PTAB has drastically altered the patent assertion landscape. Simply stated, when a patent owner is notified that a patent they own is being brought into a post grant proceeding the statistics, if not the gravity of the threat, suggest that it must be taken seriously immediately and competent representation must be obtained quickly. The burdens are different at the PTAB than they would be in the Federal District Court. Specifically, the PTAB will employ the standard USPTO technique of giving patent claims their broadest reasonable interpretation, which will make it easier for a claim to be determined to overlap with the prior art. Furthermore, in litigation patent claims are presumed valid and the defendant must prove by clear and convincing evidence that a claim is invalid for one or more reasons.

Ethics & OED: Practitioner Discipline at PTO – Feb. 2013

Jaeger did not file a response to the complaint, despite being granted two extensions of time to do so. He did, however, send two brief fax messages to OED, in one pointing out that he was an honorably discharged veteran who served during the Vietnam era, and in another pointing out that the underlying complaint that initiated disciplinary involvement stemmed from a disagreement with a client who did not want to pay his bill. Unfortunately for Jaeger, however, he never filed an answer, which meant that the allegations within the complaint were all deemed to be admitted. See 37 CFR 11.36(d).