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Patent Law

: Patently Obvious

Measuring Pendency and Allowance Rate ? The Role of RCEs

By Dennis Crouch

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I like the fact that the USPTO appears to be moving away from its fictional notion that a request for continued examination (RCE) should be counted as an abandoned and then re-filed patent application. Over the past few years, the PTO's official statistics on pendency and allowance-rate both relied on RCE counts. As a consequence, both figures were artificially depressed. In its new Patent Dashboard, the USPTO provides the traditional measures (counting an RCE as an abandonment) and the more relevant measures that treat an RCE filing as part of ordinary patent prosecution.

Data for August 2010	Allowance Rate (applications allowed divided by disposals)	Pendency (Filing date to disposal, not counting priority claims)
Traditional: RCE Filing treated as a Disposal and a New Application Filing.	45.0%	35.4 Months
Relevant: RCE filing treated as part of the prosecution of a single application.	60.2%	42.8 Months

Note, these figures include UPR applications (Utility, Plant, and Reissue). However, because of their small numbers, the plant and reissue applications do not impact the result.

Full post as published by Patently Obvious on September 08, 2010 (boomark / email).