Saturday, March 21, 2015 is the day that I blogged about a PPH petition that had been outstanding in the Office of Petitions since September 12, 2014. I don’t know if it is sheer coincidence … but the Office of Petitions considered the petition on Monday, March 23 (and granted it).
So as of now our oldest not-yet-ruled-upon PPH petitions were filed November 5 and November 13. This is still an unreasonable delay within the Office of Petitions, but not as bad as the six-month-plus delay in the case that just got its petition granted.
We just received a PPH decision on May 26 for a Request made October 14 of last year. In the interim, the Examiner had picked up the file and mailed an Office Action, so the PPH Request was denied as moot.
That’s more than 7 months of delay.
Well yes that has been happening to us quite often as well in recent months. The impression that this gives is that maybe the petition examiner wants to avoid the tedium and unpleasantness of actually having to figure out whether or not to grant the PPH petition. And then he or she checks the FOAP and sees that the case will likely get examined in a month or two. So puts the petition on ice and waits for the Office Action to get mailed. At which point the petition examiner can dismiss the petition without having to do any actual work.
Now you might thing “no harm no foul”. You wanted a prompt office action, you got your office action, so what is the problem? And the answer is that you might find the need to file an Appeal some day. In which case if the PPH petition had been granted (promptly) then the case would be “special” for purposes of Appeal. Instead you have a case which, if appealed, will take maybe five years for a decision.