Rowan Analytics Insights
Patent Prosecution Analytics Benchmarking Report – January 2023
Patent Preparation and Prosecution Survey
In our December newsletter, rather than continuing our practice of reporting on various patent prosecution statistics, we turned the focus to you, the patent practitioner community, and asked for input on your patent practice. This month we are pleased to report on the results we received.
The first question was what type of patent applications you draft – with the opportunity to select multiple answers. The results didn’t surprise us – a wide variety of responses across various technologies.
Next we asked about how many patent applications you draft per year. Again we got a variety of responses. The #1 answer was “Fewer than 10”, which tells us that you are a well rounded group and are likely also involved in other areas of IP law – litigation, trademarks, copyrights, governmental policy, etc.
Next we asked how many people work on your patent applications. The answer here provides overwhelming evidence that patent preparation and prosecution is a group activity, with the dominant answer being that 3 or more people work on your patent applications. The ability to collaborate is an important element of any patent drafting software.
The following question turned to the amount of time spent to draft a patent application. Clearly many factors influence this topic – the complexity of the invention and the ability to re-use content, etc.
This question presented a write in answer. They fell into several groups, with 70-80 hours being the most popular. If it takes two weeks of solid work to finish a patent application, are you maximizing your use of technology to assist you? Do those that do it in under 30 hours use patent drafting software?
Our last two questions also solicited fill in the blank answers. The first question was “What tasks take you the longest”? The answers coalesced around a few topics, and not surprisingly represent the major tasks associated with :
- Understanding / capturing the idea
- Developing the description & specification
- Developing the claims
- Designing the drawings
- Reviewing and incorporating client feedback
The last question was “What tasks do you enjoy the least”? Again we saw a few groupings of answers:
- Creating a summary from the claims
- Changes based on client input
- Customizing figures from boilerplate images
- Making changes to the specification
These answers illustrate the need for an integrated drafting environment, in order to easily facilitate changes to an initial draft.
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