(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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