The USPTO’s backlog of undecided PPH petitions seems to be getting worse.We have a PPH petition which we filed July 17, 2015. It has been pending before the Office of Patent Petitions since then. It had been pending for five months as of yesterday. Now it is going into its sixth month of waiting to be decided.
If these petitions were a lot of work — if they were quite difficult to decide — then I could sort of understand the backlog. But most of the factual predicates for the PPH grant are self-certified by the applicant. There is actually not that much work for the petitions person to do with one of these petitions.
When I last blogged about this a few weeks ago, the Office of Patent Petitions dashboard admitted a backlog of 136 days. As of today, the Office of Patent Petitions dashboard admits a backlog of 148 days. The true backlog is worse than 148 days. The petition I am looking at has been pending for 154 days and has still not been taken up for decision. But at least the dashboard admits that the backlog is getting worse.
How old is your oldest PPH petition that has not yet been decided? Please post a comment about your experience.
My oldest, undecided case dates back to 06 August 2015 – 4 months and counting.
The previous case took 7 months for the PPH Petition to be granted, the one before that 5 months.
Track I took three months to be granted (the Petition, not the application per se!).
A PPH Petition I filed on March 25, 2015 was decided on December 14, 2015. Because the application was allowed on October 7, 2015 (the application was a divisional application), the PPH petition was denied because of the Notice of Allowance on October 7 (requirement 3-examination has not begun). At the time of filing the PPH petition, examination had not begun and the NOA on October 7 was the first Office Action. So, it appears that the PPH petition was not reviewed until after October 7, 2015.