Category: Industrial Designs

We now have responses from more than two dozen law firms which between them have obtained about one-seventh of all of the US design patents that were granted in 2014.  Conspicuous by their absence, however, are a few well-known firms that did quite a lot of US design patent work in 2014, including the following:

• Cantor Colburn
• Foley & Lardner
• Morgan Lewis
• Birch Stewart
• Sterne Kessler
• Kilpatrick
• Nixon Vanderhye
• Finnegan Henderson
• Christensen O’Connor
• Ladas & Parry
• Wolf Greenfield
• Oblon Spivak
• Sheridan Ross

If you know someone at one of these firms, you might drop them a note and let them know they have six days left to respond with their information.  The toteboard will close on January 31 and the rankings will be posted in early February.

Design patents are suddenly important — everybody gets that by now.  There are a handful of practitioners who were active in the design patent area long before design patents became fashionable, and Chris Carani is one of that handful.  This next Wednesday Chris will host a free of charge live audio program that you can and should attend if your schedule permits.

Continue reading “Free live audio program on design patent enforcement issues”

About 23,000 US design patents issued last year.  The firms that have thus far responded to be listed in the Design Patent Tote Board between them filed about 2300 design patents, or about ten percent of that total.

So as may be seen, there are still quite a few patent firms that have not yet reported their design patent totals.  Here are some of the well-known patent firms that have not yet reported their design patent totals:

• Cantor Colburn
• Foley & Lardner
• Morgan Lewis
• Birch Stewart
• Sterne Kessler
• Kilpatrick
• Nixon Vanderhye
• Crowell & Moring
• Rader Fishman
• Westerman Hattori
• Finnegan Henderson
• Christensen O’Connor
• Harness Dickey
• Ladas & Parry
• Wolf Greenfield
• Leydig Voit
• Oblon Spivak
• Sheridan Ross
• McAndrews Held & Malloy

If you know somebody at one of these firms, I’d be grateful if you can pass along to them a link to this blog post, so that they can complete and submit the questionnaire.  Submissions will close January 31 and the tote board will be published in February of 2015.

As you will recall from this posting, I will be publishing a report in February of 2015 listing patent firms and the numbers of US design patents they obtained for clients in 2014.  In that posting I invited each firm to submit its count of US design patents obtained in 2014 (and 2013, and 2012).  As of right now, five patent firms have responded.  Between them, those five firms obtained 418 US design patents in 2014, 443 US design patents in 2013, and 432 US design patents in 2012.

There are 29 days left for submissions.  There are perhaps a hundred or so patent firms that did significant numbers of US design patent filings that issued in 2014, meaning that there are perhaps 95 or so submissions still to come.  If you are with a firm that obtained US design patents for clients in 2014, I encourage you to read the original posting to see an easy way to do the database search to count your US design patent grants, and to send in your submission.

And if you know someone who is with a firm that obtained US design patents for clients in 2014, I encourage you to pass this posting along to that person so that they will know about the opportunity to respond.

How many US design patents did your firm handle in 2014?  The last ones for 2014 issued yesterday, Tuesday, December 30.  So now you can figure out how many you filed in 2014, and send in your submission for our ranking.  Here is the questionnaire for you to complete and submit.

I will publish the results in February of 2015.

Continue reading “Submit your design patent total for the 2014 US design patent rankings”

On November 19 I blogged about the “Ghost Art Unit” at the USPTO.  This was art unit 2910, headed by SPEs Cathron Brooks and Joel Sincavage.  This was a curious art unit with no Examiners.  Our firm had some fifteen design patent applications stalled in this art unit.  The cases had no First Office Action Prediction, which was no surprise given that the art unit had no Examiners.  A comment by a USPTO person gave me the impression that a couple of thousand design patent applications, all GUI (graphical user interface) applications, were assigned to this art unit. Continue reading “Ghost art unit apparently disbanded”

Well, one of our oldest design patent applications, one that had been parked in the “ghost art unit” for some seven months, is now out of the ghost art unit.  Just today it got transferred to art unit 2911, and after some seven months without a First Office Action Prediction (“FOAP”), it again has an FOAP.

The FOAP is six months, that is, USPTO now estimates that it will examine this case in about June of 2015.

USPTO’s First Office Action Estimator says that for a newly filed application in art unit 2911, the estimated time for a newly filed design patent application to get a first office action is 13 months from now.

What’s weird about this is that our application was filed September 23, 2013.  With a backlog of 13 months, this would suggest our application should have been examined in about October of 2013.  Over a month ago.  Our seven months in the ghost art unit seem to have pushed this application back in the queue so that it will get examined much later than it should have.

Well you take what you can get.  At least this application is now back in the normal Examining Corps and after some seven months of being unable to do so, we can once again track its progress through the system.

We have over a dozen other design patent applications that were filed more recently than this one, that are still parked in the ghost art unit.  We will continue to keep an eye on them and hopefully they too will eventually be transferred to a real art unit.