Notwithstanding Undersecretary of Commerce and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director David Kappos’s recent announcement of a proposed Three Patent Processing Track system for patent examinations, we are continuing with the second part of our two-part post on the USPTO’s current Accelerated Examination (AE) option.
The premise of the AE process is simple. The inventor and his or her attorney not only prepare the patent application, but also perform a preliminary or self-examination of the application, essentially performing the patent examiner’s role ahead of time. Such self-examination requires the attorney to go through the same evaluation protocol as the patent examiner, including searching for similar prior patents and analyzing how obvious the invention is in light of similar prior patents from the same or related technical fields. The results of the self-examination are then presented to the USPTO in the form of a petition at the time of application filing. The petition is initially examined for compliance to ensure that the patentability search performed by the applicant was of proper scope and that the analysis adequately establishes grounds for patentability under the current patent laws. Read the rest of this entry »
