Posts Tagged: "TC 2800"

§ 101 Rejections in the Post-Alice Era

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.

Examining Examiners: The Top and Bottom 10 of TC 2800

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.