From 2005 to 2014, Intellectual Property Today magazine served the IP community by providing toteboards ranking US patent and trademark firms according to the number of patents and trademarks obtained for clients each year.

The Ant-Like Persistence blog now carries on this tradition.

The USPTO issued about 298000 utility patents in 2015.  The goal of this toteboard is to list the firms that helped clients to obtain these US utility patents.  It ranks the firms according to the number of US utility patents obtained in 2015.  Each firm was invited in January 2016 to submit a simple online questionnaire.  The closing date for the questionnaires was February 15, 2016.

Each firm was asked to report only US utility patents for which that firm is listed on the front page of the granted patent.  Forty-one firms responded.  Some firms that had obtained significant numbers of US utility patents in 2015, however, failed to respond.  For such firms we carried out our own database searches and arrived at numbers of patents and inserted those numbers into the table.

The resulting table accounts for over 30% of all granted US utility patents in 2015.

You can also see the 2015 US Trademark Toteboard and 2015 US Design Patent Toteboard.

You can also see all of the past toteboards.

If you wish to be included in next year’s toteboard, please subscribe to the EFS-Web listserv or subscribe to this blog.  You will then learn of the availability of the questionnaire in January of 2017.

If your firm did not respond and is not listed in these 2015 toteboards, feel free to post a comment to this article with your firm’s totals for 2015 and, if you like, the approximate ranking that you think would have resulted for your firm.