Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Easy PAIR Access for Each Examiner's Applications

One useful strategy in responding to office actions is to see what arguments other attorneys have used to convince the patent examiner to allow claims. You can then try to use similar arguments to get claims allowed for your client. To facilitate this strategy, Patent Bots examiner statistics includes a list of recent dispositions for each examiner. Here is an example for one examiner:


Previously, you would use the publication number to find the IFW on the USPTO's PAIR website and then download office actions and responses. We are happy to report that we now do this for you! After each application, there is button to view the PAIR IFW right on the Patent Bots website (and a button to view it on Google Patents). Here is an example of a Patent Bots page with the IFW for a patent application:


The first column has the basic details of the patent application, and the second column has the IFW. By default, we hide some of the things that you probably don't care about, but you can see the entire IFW by using the button there.

In this case, there was a final rejection, the attorney filed after-final response, and the examiner then allowed the claims. If you had a case pending before this examiner, you might want to look at the arguments that attorney used to persuade the examiner to allow your claims.

We plan on expanding upon this in the future. For example, for each office action, we are planning to list the rejections (e.g., 101, 102, 103, or 112) in the table. That way, you can more quickly find successful attorney arguments on the issue you are facing.