Summary
The Government Accountability Office has today released two reports on the USPTO, as well as data from from the survey of roughly 2,600 patent examiners. All three are bvelow:
Patent Office Should Define Quality, Reassess incentives, and Improve Clarity Patent Office Should Strengthen Search Capabilities and Better Monitor Examiners’ Work Survey of US Patent Examiners
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Lisa Ouellette, assistant professor at Stanford Law, commented on the Written Description Blog. “I think the survey data is more interesting than the conclusions, examiners were asked questions including how much time they spend on different partsĀ of examination how useful they found PTO training, how often, how often they searched for/used different types of prior art, what factors make prior art searching/examination difficult, how much uncompensated overtime they worked to meet production goals, how confident they were that they found the most relevant prior art, what they think of PTO quality initiatives etc. Lots of rich data here.!”
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