By Dennis Crouch
The chart above is not an EKG. Rather, it shows the ebb and flow of USPTO activity — the heartbeat of the 10,000+ patent examiners whose activity follows the bi-weekly quota system. The regular peaks come every two weeks, but the chart shows an overlay of two additional quotas: quarterly quotas (the higher blip every 3 months) and yearly quotas (the messy blip at the end of each fiscal year). Like their patent attorney counterparts, patent examiners are also deadline driven and their output increases as each deadline approaches.
The next chart focuses in on a single 14 day biweek and the blue line shows data collected from from more than a million non-final and final office actions entered 2022-2024.
The key climactic point of the chart comes at at the far right – on what I call the “Second Saturday.” The biweek count is due at 11:59 pm on that Second Saturday, and that deadline is reflected in the fact that more office actions are entered that day than any other day – it is the mode. Although examiners are working on Saturdays, recognize that several examiners have told me that they usually will have done significant work already and then finalize the work on Saturdays. In addition, junior examiners need to provide their work to a supervisor for approval. Often those approvals come in on Saturdays. But, with those caveats, a key point here is that the bi-week and quarterly deadlines are important drivers of work getting done at the Office.
In a separate post, I’ll talk through some of the potential pros and cons of this quota system, but I’d love to hear your thoughts. Does the biweekly and quarterly cram pattern impact prosecution quality?