ndrosen

I will make a special observation this week. I began work at the Patent Office on August 31, 1998. A bit more than a year later, U.S. Patent 6,000,000 was issued, on December 7, 2024. On June 4, 2024, U.S. Patent 12,000,000. A majority of the utility patents which the Patent Office has issued over its more than two hundred year history have been issued within the past twenty-five years, during the course of my own employment at the U.S. Patent Office. I don’t know how many of the patents issued from the six millionth through the twelve millionth I was involved in, but one in ten thousand is an order of magnitude estimate.

Now, as to this past week, I didn’t get any amendments, so I’m still at zero cases in my Amended docket. I did a first action on my oldest Regular New application, so that’s something accomplished, and now I’ll try to do a couple more during the next week.

This week, I wrote and posted an Office Action on my single Amended case, so I’m now down to zero cases on my Amended docket.

I finished a first action on my oldest Regular New application, and have been working on another Regular New application.

Someone has filed a Notice of Appeal in one of my rejected cases; the applicant may or may not follow up with an actual Appeal Brief.

I presume that I still have one amendment on my Amended docket; I’m not sure, because I have been unable to use my workstation today.

I finished an Office Action on a Special New case this week, but was unable to post it because something else had to be taken care of first, so I did some work on the single case on my Amended docket Thursday. When I came in to work Friday morning, I saw the blue screen of death because of CloudStrike, so I couldn’t finish writing that Office Action.

For a while, I couldn’t do anything except hang around, read the newspaper, and do the Friday sudoku puzzle; then a supervisor whose computer was working was able to print some papers for me; others were already printed. I was therefore able to read printed prior art patents and non-patent literature articles, and compare them to the printed claims in my oldest Regular New case, which came with an Information Disclosure Statement listing documents to consider. So I have been doing some work, even without access to a working work computer to work on.

This week, someone submitted an After Final amendment and request for reconsideration on a patent application; this appeared on my Expedited docket, and I dealt with it swiftly. I also finished Office Actions on two of the amendments on my Amended docket, so now I’m down to two amendments.

I’ve been working on my oldest Regular New application, and have made progress, but I’m not done yet.

I got another amendment this week, so I now have three amendments on my Amended docket.

I have been working on my oldest Regular New application, but have not finished the Office Action. I need to get things done faster to make the final quarter of the Fiscal Year a success.

I completed an Office Action on one of my three amendments, so now I’m down to two amendments on my Amended docket. This is getting to be a bit like the situation many years ago, when I started posting about “The Red Queen’s Race”; back then, I typically had a bunch of amendments, some of them getting rather aged, and had to balance working on them with working on new applications.

I also finished an Office Action on my oldest Regular New application, and started on another Regular New. This looks like something which I can do relatively fast, and with one week left in the third quarter, I need to churn out some production. Doing a first action rejection of a new application will boost my production more than doing a final rejection, or even an allowance, on a complicated amendment, and it’s the complicated, messy-looking ones that I have left.

During the past week, one post-allowance amendment appeared on my Expedited docket, and I dealt with it. The applicant wanted to clean up the language a little in an allowed case. I now have four amendments on my Amended docket, as before, and nothing on my Expedited docket.

I was assigned a Special New case, which appeared on my Special New docket; I have finished an Office Action, and posted it for credit.

Now I have those amendments to work on, and my oldest Regular New application. I won’t lack for things to do.

I acquired a second amendment on my Amended docket this week, so I’m up to two.

Earlier this week, I finished an Office Action on my single Special New case. Then I got out an Office Action on my oldest (because only) Request for Continued Examination application on my Regular New docket. Now, I’ve been working on my oldest non-RCE Regular New application. I may reasonably hope to finish that in the coming week, and probably with time to at least start work on something else, like an amendment.

I also telephoned attorneys, and confirmed that two different cases on my Rejected docket had been allowed to go abandoned with the expiration of the period for reply, so I wrote and posted notices of abandonment. This helps my productivity for the biweek look better.

Earlier this week, I finished an Office Action on the one amendment I had. Today, another amendment showed up on my Amended docket, so I’m back where I was.

I have done considerable work on my oldest Regular New non-RCE application, and I hope to finish it Monday.

Someone filed an amendment recently, so I now have one amendment on my Amended docket.

I’ve been working on my oldest Regular New application, and have made good progress writing an Office Action, although I haven’t finished yet.