Month: March 2015

Saturday, March 21, 2015 is the day that I blogged about a PPH petition that had been outstanding in the Office of Petitions since September 12, 2014.  I don’t know if it is sheer coincidence … but the Office of Petitions considered the petition on Monday, March 23 (and granted it).

So as of now our oldest not-yet-ruled-upon PPH petitions were filed November 5 and November 13.  This is still an unreasonable delay within the Office of Petitions, but not as bad as the six-month-plus delay in the case that just got its petition granted.

 

More than three and a half years … that’s how long it took the USPTO to get around to acting upon a Power of Attorney that we filed in a patent case.  Yes, the application is still pending after all this time.  It happens.

Continue reading “Three and a half years …”

A potential client will sometimes ask:

what’s your fee for filing a provisional patent application?

or sometimes the question will be:

what does it cost to apply for a provisional patent?

Or, by far the worst telephone call to receive in this general category is the potential client who cheerfully explains that he or she has prepared a draft provisional patent application, that the subject matter is “simple” and so the document should not require very long to review, and can I please just “touch it up” and file it with the USPTO?  The caller makes clear that whatever bargain-basement price I would have charged to draft a provisional patent application, the caller expects me to quote a still smaller price to merely “touch up” the document.

When this happens, generally I politely refer the potential client elsewhere, but when pressed I will sometimes answer along these lines …

Continue reading “What it costs to prepare a US provisional patent application?”

This Sunday I will be traveling to Michigan to speak at the Spring Seminar of the Intellectual Property Law Section of the State Bar of Michigan.  The Seminar will take place this coming Monday March 16.