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Effective Sunday, November 8th, the Office's Revised Count System Initiatives will go into effect, except for those initiatives that will require updates to the Office's software systems.

Most significantly, that means that the new provisions for the docketing of RCEs will come online.

The following initiatives will be effective this Sunday:

* Certification and Recertification
* Patent Examiners' Work Credit
* Changes in Docket Management Policies
* Patentability Determination and Hoteling Waiver
* Examiner-Initiated Interviews

The specifics of these initiatives were discussed in this earlier post.

According to the Memorandum of Understanding regarding the new docketing procedures, RCEs filed on or after November 15th will be placed on the Special New docket; RCEs filed prior to November 15th will continue to be placed on the Regular Amended docket.

As has been discussed here and elsewhere, this is a significant change, because examiners currently are required to act on RCEs within 2 months of when they are placed on the examiner's docket. Under the new policy, examiners will only be required to act on one application on their Special New docket per month. Since the Special New docket will be receiving RCEs, continuations, and divisionals, applications may well accumulate at a higher rate than one per month.

The Office is, however, encouraging examiners to "carefully monitor your docket to avoid developing a disproportionate backlog of RCEs".

As far as the implementation of the additional examining hours and changes to the count system, the Office is still shooting at having the necessary software changes made and tested by the beginning of the second quarter.

Good luck with that.

Full post as published by Just a Patent Examiner on November 04, 2009 (boomark / email).