Evidence Based Prosecution II: Independent and Dependent Claims

Academic Studies, Patent, Patent Prosecution

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Part II of my new series on evidence based prosecution focuses simply on a descriptive feature of the patent application.  How many independent claims should you file? Although we don’t answer that question here, we can answer the question of how many are usually filed.  Using data collected from patent applications published thus-far in 2006, I constructed the chart above comparing the average number of independent claims in a patent application to the total number of claims in the patent. 

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Voting Rights

Patent

Voting_boothSeptember 19, 2006 is primary day here in Massachusetts.  In the recent Patently-O readership poll, 542 readers cast their vote (one per computer). Those results show that slightly over half of the voting readers work in law firms.  Of those, two-fifths are in small firms.  Twenty-two percent of readers hail from in-house jobs in corporate America while about fifteen percent come from academia.  Government jobs only grabbed eight percent — although that category was not added until after 150 people had already voted. Thanks for participating!

In a related note, Patently-O reader (and creator of ToolPat) Scott Kamholz recently did his own empirical work of blue and red states. His results:

9,060 total U.S. patents issued to U.S. assignees in August 2006.
6,635 issued to assignees in "blue" states.
2,425 issued to assignees in "red" states.

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