PPH petition backlog — four months and counting

(Followup posting here.)

USPTO’s internal standard for attending to PPH petitions is two months. Well over four months have passed since the last time we saw the USPTO decide a PPH petition.  Our oldest PPH that stands unattended-to by the USPTO was filed August 26, 2014, a full four months ago now.

It’s a bit puzzling to see this backlog at all, let alone a backlog of four months or more.  Unlike the legacy PPH programs which require a USPTO person to hand-check a long list of conditions for grant of a petition, the Global-PPH and IP5-PPH programs call for the filer to self-certify nearly all of the conditions for a grant of a PPH petition.  As such, they should be easier to decide than they used to be.  All of our backlogged PPH petitions are Global-PPH or IP5-PPH.  We are puzzled that they aren’t getting decided promptly.

I blogged about this problem of the backlogged PPH petitions here and here.

How old is your oldest undecided PPH petition?  Please post a comment about this.

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