Last week, the Boston Patent Law Association held a luncheon seminar on
chemical patenting issues.  A very interesting set of speakers, including
John Terapane, Director of PTO Examining Group 1200.  His comments about
his group and the PTO in general were informative, some of which I have
summarized below.

    - Many pre- and post- processing aspects of patent prosecution are
      increasingly being handled by the Examining Groups themselves,
      instead of at centralized offices.  I think the PTO's intentions
      here at to be able to more efficiently process patent applications
      by given Examining Groups more control over their "product", 
      similar to ways some manufacturers are switching over from pure
      assembly lines to manufacturing cells.

    - Pre-First Office Action interviews - there is a pilot program in
      Group 2500 (Electronics and Optics) to have patent examiners call
      the patent attorney with preliminary questions about the general
      nature of the patent.

    - Team Examination - The idea here is that groups of three patent
      examiners would process a patent application together.  This would
      give examiners more exposure to patent applications, and hopefully
      not take much more time than having examiners working independently.
      In October, 2 teams started this technique in Group 2300, 1 team in
      Group 2600, and 1 team in Group 1200.

    - End of the US Classification System? - The PTO has observed that
      US examiners seem to cite mostly US patents, while WPO examiners
      cite foreign and US patents.  Efforts are underway at the PTO to
      network examiner's desktop PCs to access a variety of databases,
      including those used by EPO.  At that point, it would make sense
      for the examiners to use the WIPO International Patent Classification
      to be more consistent with EPO and global practices.  So he guesses
      that the US PTO will start scaling back on use of the US system,
      and eventually drop it.

    - He somewhat bragged about the experience of the examiners in his
      Group by presenting the following table:

      	Group	# Examiners	# of Primary	# Average Experience
	1200	     83		    43			13 years
	2300	    187		    18			 4
	1300	     88		    52			10
	1800	    165		    25			 5
	2600	    216		    17			 5

==============================================================================

	In a related announcement, Group 2300 (Computer systems/applications)
announced that it was hiring 10 new examiners with advanced degrees in the
field of computer science.  I guess it is their hope that these examiners
will help them get a better grip on the software patenting problem, though
without resources to cite specific prior art items, I am not sure how helpful
these computer scientists will be in light of statutory requirements.

	While these new examiners will be useful for stopping some of the
more glaringly obvious and non-novel patent from issuing, I have calculated
that at best these examiners will have only about a 4% effect on the rate
of issuance of software patents.  In economic terms, those selling patent
infringement insurance and prior art infringement defense searches have
nothing to worry about.


Greg Aharonian
Internet Patent News Service
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