USPTO meeting targets now – the log and timeline are stable

As America’s innovation agency, the USPTO understands the importance of delivering timely, efficient services that help innovators, creators, entrepreneurs, and brand owners bring their ideas to impact more quickly and efficiently. Robust and reliable patents and trademarks offer meaningful, enforceable IP protection to those who hold them and those around them who operate in the same competitive landscape. Patents In FY 2023, the USPTO received 462,215 serialized patent applications (new patent filings), an increase of 1.0% over the number received in FY 2022. Patent grants totaled 346,152, a 2.0% decrease from FY 2022. While the quantity of patent applications (filings) increased, processing time remained relatively stable with some fluctuations. Design patent applications surpassed 53,000, slightly below the USPTO’s FY 2023 projection of 60,000. The USPTO established its patent timeliness goals based on PTA, the agency’s overall adherence to statutorily defined time frames. Reducing issued PTAs provides consistently shorter processing time for all applications and gives applicants greater certainty of timeliness in their own cases. The USPTO exceeded its FY 2023 PTA target of 80%, achieving 81% total compliance for mailed actions (i.e., office actions the agency mailed to applicants). An office action is an official letter from the patent examiner to the patent applicant during the patent examination process (i.e., patent prosecution). The USPTO did not meet its PTA compliance target for remaining inventory (i.e., cases awaiting action from the agency); total PTA compliance was 82%, 4% below the target of 86%. The agency has implemented numerous approaches to address remaining inventory, including catch-up overtime, revisions to the examiner award program, and increased hiring targets. In September 2023, the USPTO issued U.S. design patent 1 million, an important milestone in American innovation and creativity. The agency continues to address patent application inventory and focus on investments in patent examination quality, including application readiness, continuation practice, prior art and searching, training, and prosecution changes and enhancements to improve patent durability. The USPTO released several external surveys throughout FY 2023 to capture customer perceptions of its work quality. These surveys focused on respondent opinions regarding patent examiners’ adherence to rules and procedures; the correctness, clarity, and consistency of rejections; and overall examination quality. The agency invited more than 3,000 randomly selected frequent customers to participate, and results showed a quality net promoter score of 58, above targeted performance. This survey cycle marked the agency’s fifth consecutive reporting period and its highest results on record, with over 60% of customers rating the agency’s work quality as good or excellent. The cornerstone of the USPTO’s work is the quality of its IP protections. Emerging technologies using AI, machine learning (ML), and robotic process automation (RPA) bring potential opportunities to maximize both the USPTO’s operations and workforce. These tools can serve as catalysts for operating efficiencies and cost savings, enhancing the work of patent examiners and increasing access to prior art. For example, all patent examiners are now using the Patents End-to-End (PE2E) Search suite, and more than half regularly engage the suite’s AI search features. To date, these examiners have run about 1.5 million queries, an indication of their adoption and acceptance of AI technology. Further, over 67% of patent examiners have used Similarity Search, a PE2E addition launched in October 2022 that uses trained AI models to produce a list of domestic and foreign patent documents based on examiner-selected application criteria (e.g., specification). Agency technical teams perform rigorous testing on these tools, collect real-time examiner feedback, and make continuous improvements to the underlying AI and ML models to meet performance standards and foster effectiveness. Ongoing assessments have yielded positive results, and the human element of AI remains the USPTO’s guiding principle in these endeavors. Human input is critical to model improvement; in fact, AI empowers, rather than replaces, human experts by exposing relevant information and suggesting new avenues of investigation. In turn, this capability allows patent examiners to find more relevant prior art that strengthens office actions and improves the reliability of patentability determinations. Recognizing that patent applications are becoming increasingly complex and that technologies are converging, the USPTO will ensure patent examiners have access to the best prior art as early as possible in the prosecution process. To that end, the USPTO continues its stewardship of the Global Dossier— another tool that improves the reliability of determinations of patentability. The dossier, delivered by the Five IP Offices or IP5 (USPTO, European Patent Office, Japan Patent Office, Korean Intellectual Property Office, and China National Intellectual Property Administration), enables agency examiners to view work from any IP5 agency, including prior art references cited in related patent applications. Trademarks The USPTO received 737,018 trademark application classes for registration in FY 2023—50,777 classes fewer than FY 2022. Although the rate of new trademark applications declined, FY 2023 trademark filings were roughly in line with the 738,112 new applications filed in FY 2020, marking [marked] a return to historical growth rates. Two important metrics for measuring the Trademarks program are first action pendency and total pendency. First action pendency is the average time from the date an application is filed to the examining attorney’s first office action. Total pendency is the average time between the date an application is filed and the notice of abandonment, notice of allowance, or registration. Trademark pendency is a top USPTO priority. For over a decade, the agency maintained trademark first action pendency between 2.5 and 3.5 months. An unprecedented surge in trademark filings during FY 2020 and FY 2021 resulted in a backlog that, in turn, increased pendency. Although new trademark application filings have since declined and inventory is stabilizing, the backlog remains high and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. Accordingly, the USPTO did not meet its total pendency target of 14.5 months for FY 2023, finishing the year instead at 14.6 months (0.1 months higher than goal). First action pendency, however, was 8.5 months, which met the planned target. During FY 2023, the USPTO launched the following initiatives to reduce trademark pendency and enhance customer communication: