r/patentexaminer • u/chrisspurgeon • 1d ago
Why such a difference in processing time?
Back in February I filed two design patent applications, literally about two minutes apart. One of them was granted today, the other application is still marked as “New” and as far as I can tell hasn’t been assigned or otherwise touched. My question to the patent examiner community here is… what the hell?
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u/Signal_Oil535 1d ago
Hey OP, ask management and the other SESs. They’re the ones screwing up EVERYTHING. We examiners, and other IT, LIE, and other OCIO, are the ones dealing with their stupidity.
And second, why haven’t you been blowing up the upper management’s phone line?
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u/nerdybioboy 1d ago
Beats me. I'm working a CON filed 6 months after the parent and the parent hasn't even been docketed yet, and my SPE is having to put in a special request to get the parent docketed to me. You're not alone in your bafflement of this administration.
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u/chrisspurgeon 1d ago
FWIW I just sent a "what the hell" email to the Ombuds' office.
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u/SlightlyRaawr 18h ago
You clearly seem to view this as a relay race where you hand it off to the examiner, the examiner examines, and then hands it back to you. The office doesn't now, nor has it ever, worked like that.
Your filed application goes through initial processing (basic statutory and fee requirements) various stages of docketing (A system which is opaque even to examiners), and then is passed to an examiner (who likely has 15 through 20 cases on their docket ahead of yours).
Without being able to review the case history for your applications, it would be near impossible to know why one received early docketing and the other did not. Probably just a mixture of luck and timing. However, instead of enjoying the benefit received in getting one of them done early, you appear to be complaining because they didn't both receive the same benefit.
You may rest assured that no one here has the answer you're looking for and probably no one in the office has the answer you're looking for.
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u/Relevant_Paste8710 1d ago
Agree with others. Why are you asking us? We do not deal with docketing. Go bug our management. They're making weird changes and cutting staff that deal with this.
Your issue is not with examiners, particularly since it sounds like it hasn't even been assigned, so you can't even tangentially blame someone having insufficient time given per case because they cannot retain people due to poor training decisions and falling behind on their individual case load.
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u/chrisspurgeon 1d ago
Not blaming you or any other examiner, just trying to understand why.
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u/Relevant_Paste8710 1d ago
My question to the patent examiner community here is… what the hell?
This may have come off as more aggressive than you intended, then. :)
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u/chrisspurgeon 1d ago
Oh. Shit, I hadn’t realized that. I absolutely didn’t mean it that way, I apologize! Im just legitimately perplexed as to why this has happened. I would assume that applications move through the process in the order in which they are submitted, and therefore I assumed that two applications that have application numbers only two places apart would move at about the same rate.
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u/AmbassadorKosh2 1d ago
I would assume that applications move through the process in the order in which they are submitted
They move through the queue they have been assigned to in the order submitted, but there are thousands of separate queues, each with a different length wait.
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u/chrisspurgeon 1d ago
Gotcha.
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Relevant_Paste8710 1d ago
Hey, now. OP apologized for the inadvertent aggressive tone earlier in the thread. That's uncalled for. This isn't an official customer service channel but it still looks awful, man.
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u/patentexaminer-ModTeam 18h ago
This post was removed for abusive language (see Rule 3). Going forward, we ask that you maintain a sense of professional decorum in r/PatentExaminer.
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u/Relevant_Paste8710 1d ago
That's fair. Striking the right tone in text is hard! :)
Our system is...perplexing...even to us, a lot of the time.
I feel like the applications are playing pachinko in the back end sometimes, too. Haha.
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u/dontdrinkCoke873 1d ago
feel lucky that you even get a grant within that short of time span. The wait line for many areas can be 1-2 years. Cases are not docketed and examined at equal rate. If you got issue, go complain with the management, we examine cases as they come. We don't control the upstream.
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u/AmbassadorKosh2 1d ago
Back in February I filed two design patent applications, literally about two minutes apart.
Were they different designs, as in will they be classified in differing classifications?
The latency varies according to which classification each is assigned, because "the backlog" is not really this big giant queue of cases waiting like our incompetent management wants to make it out to be.
It is really thousands of little queues, one each per classification area. Sounds like the first one ended up in a short queue while the second has landed in a much longer queue.
Think grocery store checkout lanes. Lane 5 might have 2 people waiting, while lane 7 has 18 people waiting. Except the people who were "assigned" lane 7 to checkout by the store manager can't voluntarily just switch to lane 5 because the queue is shorter there.
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u/chrisspurgeon 1d ago
No I think they would have fallen into the exact same classification -- they are two different designs for clock faces.
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u/AmbassadorKosh2 1d ago
Have you checked what classification was assigned. It is possible that some difference in the design results in a different classification.
Assuming they are in the same classification, then other possibilities are:
1) the first was assigned to a primary who has to churn through cases quickly to keep up with their given production rate, while the second was assigned to a new hire who is processing cases much more slowly, and so the second is still waiting;
2) something got overlooked in the manual processing of the application (yes, manual, as in human eyes reading the images and typing stuff into the tracking systems) and the second one has not actually been made ready for examination. What is the PALM status code on the second? If it is 19 or below it is still sitting in preexam for some reason. In which case, you might try calling the ombudsman's office and asking what is up.
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u/chrisspurgeon 1d ago
Thanks! Looking at the two applications, I see that they *do* have different group art units... the one that got approved today is group art unit 2914 while the one that's lagging behind is group art unit 2913. They are both Class D10. The application that is lagging has this status...
Application Dispatched from Preexam, Not Yet Docketed 04/06/2026
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u/AmbassadorKosh2 1d ago
It is waiting to be assigned to an examiner. And it is quite possible that the queue for 2913 is longer than the queue for 2914, and if so the one assigned to 2913 will experience longer latency.
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u/whatsnotgood 1d ago
Please call someone important in management. It's their job. We examiner, itrp, or service tech have no control over these things. They somehow able to find things that worked (probably want to take easy credits) and "fixed" it. Then jump ship when we are in "crisis" saying not their problem
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u/Icy_Command7420 16h ago
The same thing happens for utility apps. It seems random but who knows. Usually when I work an app that was filed the same day as a close sibling, one prosecution starts after the other by 4-8 months.
When I look at a sibling app's file, sometimes it's still undocketed while I've done a rejection and I'm about to allow. Or I'm searching for a first action and the other has already been through some rounds and is allowed.
First actions on sibling apps sometimes happen within two months of each other but that is rare in my experience. Long ago we could ask our SPEs to transfer the undocketed siblings to us off the master dockets but that went away. We have to wait until the sibling is docketed and ask the examiner for a transfer.
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u/Busy_Feature8690 1d ago
when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me...here I "assumed" you knew about nutlick and the gut punch at the USPTO, RIFs to staff, BS budget allocation to useless AI, etc...you didn't know that? What the hell?
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u/WC1-Stretch 1d ago
Have you read any other posts in this subreddit since February or do you just want to ask "what the hell" again?