Should you interview your patent examiner?

We've added new statistics to Patent Bots to help you make better decisions regarding examiner interviews.  For most examiners, their grant rate increases for cases that have interviews over those that don't.  For some examiners, however, their grant rate actually goes down.

Here is an example:

You can see this examiner's grant rate for cases without any interviews, the grant rate for cases with at least one interview, and the benefit from doing an interview (along with the same stats for the art unit and the USPTO).

For this examiner, you are 8% less likely to get a patent if you conduct an interview!  By contrast, the USPTO average is that your chances increase by 15%.

This examiner also seems to avoid doing interviews.  Of the 157 cases before him, only 12 of them have had an interview.  If you have this examiner, you are better off not requesting an interview.

Here is a summary of some other improvements over the previous month:

• For reference label processing, we process figures in PDF format that include text ( we don't OCR yet)
• Improvements in our antecedent basis analysis.
• Better extraction of ref labels so that we don't count things like IP addresses as reference labels.
• Better handling of multiple dependent claims.