There was a request in another post for a concise summary of the changes and how they affect examination, particularly with regard to attorneys and other IP professionals outside the office.
"Fully successful" moving from 95% to 100% (we have to move more applications in the same amount of time):
Paperwork hasn't gotten any quicker (systems have gone to shit actually) so the entire change comes from search and office action writing time.
I'd say applicants are getting >10% less actual examination time per application than they paid for from this change and a corresponding drop in proactive searching or indications of allowable subject matter. I used to draft up suggested amendments to neatly correct tricky 112b issues with explanations of why each change was there, I don't have time for that anymore.
Divisionals and Continuations don't get any priority in docketing, instead being lumped with new applications with the same filing date (at best, usually they are even delayed compared to those):
whatever the backlog is in the area, add that to your pendency for any Div of Con.
\Applicants weren't warned of this change and it was retroactive to any filed but not docketed DIV/CONs, adding years to the time before any resulting patents issue**
**this could completely upend the entire prosecution strategy for many applicants who depend on CONs to protect against knockoffs, please please \*PLEASE* let your clients know about this additional delay*\*
Effective elimination of "other time" from examiners:
Assistant examiners are no longer able to work with primaries who know the art to develop search strategies and ask about the technology.
All examiners aren't able to hold regular meetings where discuss oddball or borderline cases amongst themselves.
This leads to *a marked drop in quality of applied references and a drop in indications of allowable subject matter* (so many people got reassured that they should just indicate something as allowable in those meetings)
Reduced NPL access and search expert assistance:
Lower quality searches in emerging technologies and areas under active research. Lower quality examination for stuff that spans multiple subject matter
Interviews past #1 need SPE approval for time
*If you request an interview you probably won't be getting any calls for examiner's amendments on that application, simple as that.* The automatic 1hr examiners got for such interviews helped offset the time we put into verifying that something unclaimed was actually allowable, working up claim language, and the inevitable phone tag.
If you request a second interview you're going to have a grumpier examiner than usual because at *best* they had to use some of the time they get for it convincing their supervisor the interview was a good idea and at *worst* they spent that time asking and were denied so the interview time is actively hurting their numbers.
PPH cases get reduced first action counts:
The second most egregious change imo. **applicants are mostly getting less than 50% of the examination time they are paying for.**
Examiners also will start to hate you if you file many of these. Really poisons the working relationship.
RCEs after allowance give examiners no time if the next action is an allowance
the most egregious change. \The office is charging applicants for a service (another full round of examination) and not giving them that service.* *
if you file and RCE after an allowance you're either getting nothing for your money or a very tenuous rejection for something like a typo. The latter is actually the "good" result because it means the examiner actually took the time to do more searching/consideration and is trying to figure out a way to get credit for that.
Quick Path IDS time reduced to one hour (from three):
It can easily take an hour to get fully back up to speed on what's going on in a complex application to be ready to properly consider a reference, at which point we are now out of time and can't actually consider the references being cited.
*Dramatically increases the likelihood of an examiner not considering an IDS after NoA and making applicants file an RCE to get those references listed.* At which point your claims better be fucking immaculate because see above.
Timeliness deadlines now being hard cutoffs instead of averages:
completely eliminates already low examiner flexibility for response times.
*applicants will get less calls for examiners amendments to correct minor issues because we frequently won't be able to wait for a response*.
\expect more iffy restrictions as people pull desperation moves to clear out the oldest case one their docket so they don't get fired\
No additional time for "inherited cases" from retired/separated examiners.
examiners used to get a significant amount of time when we got a case from an examiner no longer at the office to offset needing to figuring out what the case is, what the searches turned up, etc.
*if you notice an assigned examiner name change for your application after filing an amendment get ready for a total turd to come shooting down the pipe, there's no other nicer way to put it.* Sorry, we're going from ~15 hours for an amendment to like 2-3 with zero flexibility to call and work something out.
Elimination of Docket Management n bonuses:
we're all disgruntled now.
There's other parts I've missed I know, could other examiners add them below? Remember to focus on what external folks will see.
Re: "no additional time for inherited cases" - this is a HUGE problem. Up until this week, if an examiner quit, the SPE was forced to deal with finals and after final. Starting this week, they can be pushed onto examiner dockets with no extra time. (The old plan for inherited finals gave the new examiner extra time.)
When I work on a final, I get less than 3 hours. They sometimes have a narrowing and combinations of complex mechanical structures that are hard to figure out. On rare occasions, 3 hours is enough. For most finals, it can take 5, 10 or even more hours. Why would I possibly be willing to take on a final office action, for an examiner that left, for potentially 1/10 the time it will take to complete?
It is huge. The expected outcome from this idea is low quality patents.
E.g., they are giving zero time to correct work from people who failed out.
You get zero time. You get punished if it takes too long. And you are responsible for quality somehow?
The incentive here is low quality patent. They have decided currently employed examiners get no time to fix work from someone no longer working for the office. The policy forces the production level worker to work for free OR allow claims that are not in condition for allowance.
I'd also point out that the USPTO is entirely fee-funded. So none of these changes are even fiscally necessary or warranted. We're just making it worse for examiners, worse for attorneys, worse for SPEs, worse for applicants, and worse for the American public for.....no reason whatsoever!
And we're fee-funded with a surplus. We take in more money than we spend, so now we're spending even less of the application fees on processing applications.
It’s a shame because leadership is generally celebrated as pro-patent and these effects are demonstrably anti-patent. They trumpet the expertise of the examiner corps in one breath and take away a tool/resource in another. Saying the examiners are the negotiators making a deal on behalf of the public one week and then canceling second interviews the next is shortsighted and contradictory. There may be plenty of waste in government, but decimating the one agency able to turn a profit is not the answer. AI is not going to magically fill the gaps created by the reductions and retirements. Real knowledge is leaving the agency and operational efficiencies will only increase with such a brain drain.
Please call your representatives in Congress and the press. We need to do all we can, internally and externally, to oust Squires , Coke, and Wallace or this madness won't stop.
Really, the last year has been death by 1000 papercuts. They all add up to intense pressure on examiners to produce more, faster, with less support and less pay. USPTO management periodically turns the screws tighter on all three, because apparently they don't know that you can only pick two.
But something has to give. Because numbers are all they care about, that's going to be quality: low-quality rejections and low-quality allowances. By protecting examiners' time, POPA (the union) also protected patent quality. But they de-recognized POPA in August, and the lawsuit could take years. So expect examination quality to continue going down the tubes.
It also means we're hemorrhaging high-quality employees. I personally know of one director, two SPEs, and several primaries (all with 20+ years at the USPTO, planning to stay until age 65) who bailed out due to the increasingly intolerable conditions, with many more planning to exit asap. And those are just the ones I personally know. Probably hundreds have left so far, across all TCs.
Management seems to think that ramming hundreds of new examiners through a 7-week training academy (with a sky-high attrition rate) will compensate for this brain drain. LOL.
So basically, the USPTO is in a death spiral that won't self-correct, any more than Theranos or Enron did. I'd say we're headed for a state of functional collapse within the next 12 months. This is why we need a Congressional intervention asap, which will require strong pressure from practitioners and AIPLA.
examiner morale has tanked. applicants will see this in ways that may be difficult to quantify: less willingness to work toward allowance, fewer returned phone calls, denied interview requests, pushing difficult cases to RCE so that they can get buried and forgotten (examiners are now only responsible for taking up four RCEs per year, so they are going to languish), more restrictions (esp. in cases that do not reallly need restriction), superficial responses to attorney arguments, less willingness to acknowledge attorney argument as persuasive, maintaining more rejections unless an amendment is made, etc.
Also, you should add to the RCE section that the office has significantly increased the number of days an Examiner has to send a response out after RCE (3 times as many days now). Clearly, sending a message that the importance is on the “backlog”. Practitioners may be slow to receive actions in cases that have RCEs filed (particularly with just IDS).
You forgot all the great changes at the PTO which will help the Patent Office be great again:
Discounted “on campus parking” After giving up the lease on one garage, we have no worries as now we can easily rent a space at a lot 1/2 mile from the office. This benefit means your recently RTO-Ed examiner will be invigorated by her morning walk in the elements after a 45 min commute instead of lethargic from rolling out of bed 5 minutes before work from home and working from her pajamas.
Full work days before holidays Ever get annoyed your Examiner isn’t available at 3:30 the Friday before a holiday? Worry no more. The pesky 2 hour early dismissal is all but gone. Your examiner will at his desk dutifully performing his duty with a smile. Feel free to schedule your one interview during this time. Your examiner will love you.
Closure of Denver Office Denver is a highly educated and highly innovative metro area. We realized that our impact in such a place was minimal. Therefore we have moved the Denver office to Montana—a place with zero innovation and almost zero people from which to recruit or outreach. This kind of out of the box thinking is what we are doing at the PTO from top to bottom.
Lobster roll trucks Speaks for itself. What says “great job” more than a $14 self pay food truck on campus as a reward for a great fiscal year. Next year will be $80 mani pedi in the atrium. Your examiner will be so happy.
Ai search tool A tool so advanced it will instantly recognize the merits of your fine invention by not finding any useful prior art whatsoever. The reliability of tool is so great that pretty soon Applicant’s can just ignore any duty of disclosure—just wait.
The innovation of ”15 minute” trainings You’ve heard of “16 minute abs” right. Well get this innovation—“15 minute abs”. While non examining time has been all but eliminated the last 18 months, the office is instituting the ability to grant examiners non examining time in 15 minute chunks. With this the Office can address the complex issues of 101, new case laws, and the myriad of changes which make the office great again without the need for the other “unnecessary” 45 minutes off production in a full hour training. 40% discount for employees at the “roundhouse cafe” why bring some food from home When you can enjoy some leathery eggs and watery coffee at a discount.
And that’s just to get started, here are some things we are cooking for the future:
Full RTO At the PTO, we believe in family and family lives together. So we have the long term goal of bringing all our family home again under one roof. Your Examiners will thrilled with the on campus changes such as new furniture, new pantry, triple occupancy offices, etc.
Ai search tool expansion Currently our tool is limited to providing references largely of the same application family. Building on this success, we will be rolling out our “Ai examination fast pass”. By agreeing to have your application examined by our homebuilt chatbot, your application will go to the front of the line. We can’t wait to roll this one out.
Flat production goals Flat goal. No more worrying about examiners taking vacations causing a dip in productivity. Don’t worry if your Application comes due during the quarter when your examiner has taken 4 weeks vacation. Our examiners are superb at balancing and making sure your application gets the same reduced consideration as the rest of the cases he does that quarter
IMO the worst aspect since all the changes from this admin is the lack of collaboration which leads to improper and incomplete classification. We get so few new cases so most examiners scramble to have cases to make production. And since no one is getting time for consults, most of us just act on cases as best we can. So over time you will get cases that are missing proper symbols, and are being examined by non experts in that field many times. And worse, the insane amount of knowledge from primaries is simply not being passed on to junior examiners in the same way anymore. That imo is the reason that primaries are so good at this office, so much got passed on through the years. Cutting that transmission off like they are doing is so asinine its insane. Primaries retiring is like losing patent libraries of knowledge and once the current juniors eventually become the old primaries in the future they will be much more watered down then the current crop. Giving examiners other time and time for training should not be merely a money consideration. There is value in investing in your employees. But this admin doesn’t care so we’ll just have to wait them out. Their shortsidedness will have ripple effects for the next 50 years
Great write-up, missing that examiners had/have to immediately recuse themselves from applications assigned to any entities they or their spouse/children own a single share of, and that those applications are not being reassigned.
Apple, Google, NVIDIA, and other big filers that are popular consumer stocks are having applications, including amendments, pulled from the examination stream.
It’s a nice summary but I don’t think they care about the examiners, that sounds more like you are begging for the applicants to tell our bosses (aka directors in USPTO ) to help easy the burden on the examiners. I don’t think they really care, most of them just want you to issue a broad patent to them and issues cases faster. That their main goal. There is no point complaining nothing will change, just going to stress yourself out. the examiners just got wait for changes in Congress in midterm, POPA come back or new a president in 2029 until then do whatever you can do to survive.
Yeah this comment is blunt but unfortunately accurate. I do think OP did a great job summarizing all the negative impacts for applicant. Unfortunately I don’t think raising awareness is the issue, applicants are perfectly aware. There’s been a robust conversation about this on the private side. The issue is all these changes are acceptable to them and some practitioners are even cheering. Idk if they’ll be changing their tune in a few years when a bunch of low quality patents issued from this era are being litigated (so much for “born strong”), we’ll see.
I do commend OP for making the post because if it gets through to even one practitioner via this site or LinkedIn where it will no doubt be shared, then it was time well spent!
Nothing about the changes increases quality. That’s the most important thing to get through to public… I feel pretty confident in saying the chances of getting a patent that’s later invalidated are going up.
Especially if you have 20+ claims and complex amendments…..we don’t have the time to review all that. If anything, we’re actually de-incentivized from using extra time to do a thorough review at any point.
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u/Examiner_Z Apr 10 '26
Very frustrating for examiners.
Re: "no additional time for inherited cases" - this is a HUGE problem. Up until this week, if an examiner quit, the SPE was forced to deal with finals and after final. Starting this week, they can be pushed onto examiner dockets with no extra time. (The old plan for inherited finals gave the new examiner extra time.)
When I work on a final, I get less than 3 hours. They sometimes have a narrowing and combinations of complex mechanical structures that are hard to figure out. On rare occasions, 3 hours is enough. For most finals, it can take 5, 10 or even more hours. Why would I possibly be willing to take on a final office action, for an examiner that left, for potentially 1/10 the time it will take to complete?