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Revised Count System

The Office sent an email earlier this week, notifying the corps that the changes to the count system will be taking effect starting on February 14th. (Happy Valentine's Day!)

For a while, examiners' production will be tracked under both the old and new count systems, with the examiner being graded based on whichever system works to their advantage. My guess is that they'll allow examiners that luxury only until the end of this fiscal year, so we'll have about 7 1/2 months to adapt the conduct of our examination to the new system. Generally, that means that we'll need to dispose of applications earlier in prosecution (*really* dispose of them; this does not include the abandonment that comes with an RCE), because the total possible counts per balanced disposal will decrease by .25 with each subsequent RCE (up to two).

Ought to be interesting.

Full post as published by Just a Patent Examiner on January 21, 2010 (boomark / email).