The Red Queen's Race

[ndrosen]

This week, I got one case on Amended docket, and one on my Special Amended docket. I dealt with two older cases on my Amended docket, so now I have three regular Amended and one Special Amended cases. The Special Amended case is actually a Board of Appeals decision affirming the rejection of an application; I wrote the Examiner's Answer replying to the Appeal Brief, but I inherited the case from someone else who made the rejections before ascending to the Board of Appeals. (She was not one of the Administrative Patent Judges who decided the appeal, of course.) My new Amended case is actually a response to a restriction; a few months ago, I sent out a restriction saying that the different sets of claims in a case were different enough from each other to put an undue burden on the examiner, so the applicant had to elect which set of claims I would examine, and has now done so.

I also finished an Office Action on my Special New case, did an Office Action on a Request for Continued Examination case, and confirmed abandonment of an application more than six months after I sent out a first action rejection to which I received no reply.

This weeken is the end of the second quarter of the fiscal year, and I have made adequate production for the quarter. That's a big load off my mind.