On August 16, 2016, The United Stated Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published a notice in the Federal Register regarding changes to the Accelerated Examination Practice. Besides the changes, the USPTO is considering the value of continuing the program.
The USPTO introduced an accelerated examination program in 2006. The program allows a patent application to be examined out of turn if an applicant’s petition to make special is granted under the program. The 2006 AE Notice lists several requirements including a pre-examination search, an accelerated examination support document (AESD), and the application must be complete at the time of filing and it must be filed through EFS-Web.
There are a number reasons a petition to make special can be granted: an inventor is over the age of 65 or has a progressing illness that may prevent assisting in the prosecution in the standard prosecution time; a request to make special is made by a government agency; the patent pertains to an area in the public’s interest such as development of a vaccine for the Zika virus, or the application was indicated as allowable in a foreign jurisdiction and is participating in the Patent Prosecution Highway.
According to the notice, recent changes in examination practice and in the law such as America Invents Act (AIA), Patent Law Treaties Implementation Act (PLTIA) to implement the provisions of the Patent Law Treaty (PLT) and the conversion to the Cooperative Patent Classification system (CPC), have made some requirements and practices of the program no longer applicable. The program is being updated to accommodate these changes.
The USPTO is considering discontinuing the AE program. Since implementing the prioritized examination program (Track I) provided for in the America Invents Act (AIA) in 2011, requests for Accelerated Examination have decreased. The USPTO has less than 200 requests annually for AE. The USPTO plans to publish a request for comments in the Federal Register to garner public input on whether there is value in continuing the AE program considering popularity of the Track I program.