Last week’s pendency data used the application filing-date as its starting-point measuring pendency. As a follow-on, I took the same set of 10,000 recently issued patents and obtained the earliest associated US priority filing. As before, the average pendency for patents based on original applications was 40.4 months. Patents that were based on a single provisional filing took about 10-months longer or 50.4 months. The 10-month difference for provisionals makes since since that is about the amount of time you would ordinarily wait to file the non-provisional.(n1) The time-in-process for continuations, CIP’s, divisionals, and patents based on multiple provisionals was much large — coming-in at 70.7 months. Averaging these together, the average time from the earliest US priority date until issuance is just over four years (49.2 months). Medians are slightly lower than means because of the skewed nature of the data. (n2).
- n1: The average delay from provisional filing to non-provisional was 11 months (334 days).
- n2: Skew can be seen in the histogram.
So – since I started practicing in 2000 the Applicant community has agreed to and lobbied for the USPTO to get more resources to enhance the quality and timeliness of examination. So – have the number of applications filed still significantly outpaced the growth in funds & resources? Or is there another problem – for example, the incredible pressure on the Examiners which may be leading to high turnover?
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