Posts Tagged: "After Final Petition Practice"

While researching the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) treatment of final Office actions for previous articles (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V), we noticed USPTO petition pendency and grant rate statistics often differed from results of our analysis. Applicants relying on the pendency information provided by the USPTO Data Visualization Center prior to January 2021 would expect their petitions filed after final to be decided on average in two to three months. However, our prior publications document decisions often inexplicably delayed to such an extent that applicants were compelled to take other action to avoid abandonment of their applications. The USPTO has updated its after final petition data twice since the publication of Part V – now showing a 12-month rolling average processing time of greater than 180 days. A six month delay in processing such petitions renders any resulting decision as futile. Here, we investigate petitions decided during the fourth quarter of 2020 to determine why petition pendency has skyrocketed and what this means for applicants seeking to challenge an Examiner’s premature determination of finality.