[Patentpractice] Am I reading this correctly?

[David Boundy]

Here are excerpts from a Law360 article this morning -- I think what this
is saying is that the PTO is re-prioritizing from *finishing *examination
(getting to issue or abandonment) to *first action*?  (Remember that every
single pull-forward of one application pushes every single other
application back in the queue by a day.)  If I recall, Kappos tried this,
and pretty quickly found out that applicants care a lot more about getting
to end point?  The "awaiting examination" backlog is relatively
irrelevant?  Efficiency is making sure that applications once in active
prosecution stay at top of mind?  Enlarging the time between examination
rounds introduces *inefficiency*?  Is there no-one left at the PTO from
even twelve years ago that can remind current management that this (if I'm
reading the press release correctly) is a counter-productive idea?


At a USPTO Hour webinar, acting Commissioner for Patents Valencia Martin
Wallace said that at the beginning of the year, the office had over 837,000
patent applications awaiting examination, but now it has fewer than 794,000.

"So that means our employees are working very smart and very hard to make
sure that our community and our applicants are receiving ... the decisions
that they deserve and the patent grants that they deserve," she said.

Martin Wallace said the USPTO's goal is to reduce the time to reach a first
action to 12 months and the total pendency to 24 months, while bringing the
backlog below 599,000 applications.

"These are very challenging goals for us, but nothing that we will not be
able to overcome," she said.
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