Posts Tagged: "allowances"

The importance of reviewing statistics within an individual art unit

We collected statistics on recent activity within Art Unit 1655, which covers drug, bio-affecting and body treating compositions. Overall, this Art Unit has an allowance rate of 54.3%, meaning that slightly under half of all patent applications filed in this art unit do not result in a patent grant… Interestingly, some companies in this sector do exceedingly well at converting their innovative concepts into actual IP assets. Cosmetic marketing company Mary Kay, for example, only had a total of 46 patent applications in this art unit but enjoys a 94.4% allowance rate… By contrast… Japanese company, Shiseido, had an allowance rate of 26.7%…

A Pre-Appeal Brief Conference is a Winning Strategy, Even if it Probably Won’t Lead to Allowance

After several articles and webinars discussing appeals outcomes at the USPTO, we have received numerous requests for Pre-Appeal Brief Conference data to explain how advantageous the program really is for applicants. Using the vast data resources of our system and Public PAIR, we studied all appeals from January 1, 2006 (six months after the program was instituted), to the present day, including pending PBC cases. For the purposes of this article, we were chiefly concerned with the overall effect that a PBC had on the outcome of an appeal. As such, we have indicated that a PBC ended with a “decision for applicant” when the application was either allowed or prosecution was reopened following a PBC decision, regardless of whether the decision was due to the PBC decision itself or a subsequent pre-appeal brief office action. What we found was that, while few PBCs result in an allowance from the PBC decision itself, they have a net positive effect on an application’s overall appeals success. An explanation of our findings follows.

A Better Way to File Patent Applications

The PathWays system is designed to help applicants predict which art units an application is likely to be filed before the application is even filed. A unique semantic search algorithm compares user submitted text to weighted key words derived from an exhaustive collection of application documents clustered in each USPTO art unit.

Innovation America: Patent Applications and Allowances by State

Looking at raw numbers, California was by far the most inventive state, with over 329,000 non-design patents filed, over 254,000 disposed, and over 180,000 allowed between 2000 and 2010. Texas, New York, Massachusetts, and Washington rounded out the top five, but together had fewer applications, disposed applications, and allowed applications than California alone. The states with the highest allowance rates were Vermont (84%), Idaho (77%), Kansas (74%), Washington (74%) and Iowa (73%).

Want to Increase Your Chance of Allowance by 19 Percentage Points? That’ll be $4,000

Perhaps the most shocking difference between Track One applications and standard applications is allowance rate. Standard applications have an allowance rate of 70%; however, Track One applications are approved 89% of the time. Put another way, a Track One application is 19 percentage points more likely to receive an allowance than a standard application.