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Clearing the Oldest Patent Applications (COPA)

A memo was distributed to the corps last week regarding a new backlog-fighting effort. [The Office's latest Strategic Plan includes the goal of reducing first action pendency to 10 months by 2014; pretty darn ambitious.]

The details haven't been released yet, but the memo did outline how the effort would work.

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Let's start with the bottom line: The Office wants all applications with an actual filing date prior to June 7th 2009 to receive first actions by the end of the fiscal year. Obviously, some tech centers have a larger backlog than others, which means that this goal is likely no problem at all for some, but a big stretch for others.

The Office's strategy in addressing this problem is to

"...rebalance workloads by sharing resources both within and across Technology Centers. Workloads will be rebalanced by identifying technological overlaps between art units and TCs thereby matching backlog applications to available resources."

How effective is this likely to be? Well, it will certainly help, but perhaps only to a limited extent. Any technological areas that are related enough that the applications of one could be reasonably be examined by examiners from the other are also likely to have a similar-sized backlog.

On the other hand, some examiners have past experience and/or expertise in technical areas in which they are not currently examining, for whatever reason. The Office will be distributing a questionnaire which will be used to find such examiners, and to gauge their interest in examining new cases from those areas.

The details on how differences in hours per BD across technical areas are yet to be released, although similar technical areas have similar or identical hours allocated, so this isn't likely to be an issue in most cases.

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This is really an interesting idea. The Office is constantly trying to re-balance the distribution of resources [i.e., examiners] to address the volume of applications received through new hiring, but that can be a gradual process. If the Office is going to have any chance of achieving their ambitious pendency goals, they are obviously going to have to do some innovative thinking.

This program would seem to qualify.

Full post as published by Just a Patent Examiner on March 22, 2011 (boomark / email).