The perception alone of backlogs pressures examiners to crank out low-quality patents---magnifies the link.
Ackermant ’11 [Lily J; J.D. Candidate, 2012, University of California, Berkeley School of Law; “PRIORITIZATION: ADDRESSING THE PATENT APPLICATION BACKLOG AT THE UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 2011, https://btlj.org/data/articles2015/vol26/26_1_AR/26-berkeley-tech-l-j-0067-0092.pdf, Pg. 70, wally]
A second objective in furtherance of the USPTO's constitutional mandate is to issue high-quality, valid patents that will incentivize innovation." A low-quality, invalid patent hampers innovation if inventors avoid developing new inventions for fear of infringement liability or the inability to secure a license.24 Presumably, the more time a patent examiner spends searching and analyzing the prior art during examination, the more likely he or she will issue a valid patent. However, public scrutiny of the backlog may put pressure on overworked examiners to examine an application quickly, potentially in less time than is ideally needed to produce a high quality patent.25 To balance these competing forces, the USPTO needs examination procedures that speed up the examination process to address the backlog, while maintaining or improving overall patent quality. The developers of the current and proposed prioritization procedures discussed in this Note designed the procedures to put applications in a specific order and to reduce exanunation time. In addition to ordering applications and reducing examination time, prioritization procedures could also incorporate protocols designed to improve patent quality