The § 101 rejection rate for patent applications in the e-commerce work groups approaches 100%, then drops precipitously for the remaining seven of the top ten work groups with the greatest percentage of § 101 rejections. Before Bilski, the § 101 rejection rate in the e-commerce work groups hovered around around the 30% mark, but has now tripled. The remaining work groups have also seen their § 101 rejection rates rise by 200-300%, although they make up a significantly smaller proportion of total rejections than in the e-commerce art units. While it did not surprise us that these work groups were at the very top of the list for § 101 rejections, we also wanted to know what other technologies are particularly prone to § 101 rejections.
From all cases filed in the last 10 years, we filtered for all final dispositions in all of 2015 and 2016. Taking this data, we examine TC-2800 at three levels of detail: the overall statistics; a breakdown of the allowance rate by stage of prosecution; and finally, all the way down to the extremes of variation exhibited by individual examiners. The deepest investigation exposes a range of patterns unobserved in a focus on allowance rates alone. Relatively small changes in allowance rates, for example +/-15%, correlate to a 2x change in the effort and cost of an allowance.