Patent examiners go rogue – efficiency can never be guaranteed

The USPTO has an examiner problem, and everyone in the industry has known about it for a very long time. There are some examiners that do not follow the law, and they ignore Office procedures, rules, and protocols. There are some examiners that never issue any patents, year after year denying everything they review. Likely because of archaic government human resources rules, it is virtually impossible to fire malcontent and malicious examiners. The Office solution is to leave them in place and turn the application process into a crapshoot for innovators.

Luckily, as the result of examiner allowance data being readily available, it is easy enough today to identify when you have received an examiner with a single-digit allowance rate, which should simply cause sane innovators to abandon immediately. What is impossible to identify, however, is when an examiner will use their own biases and morality rather than the law to prevent a patent from ever issuing.

Examiners are given a certain number of hours to examine applications. If they are unable to find prior art or any legitimate reason to reject within the allotted hours they are supposed to issue the patent. That is the law, and it is what the rules require. But that is apparently not what always what happens.