Last month when I called the patent office I spoke with someone who worked directly for the Acting Associate Commissioner. I had explained to him that there seems to be a disconnect between the MPEP, operational statistics and real world. The MPEP speaks to expediting the re-exam when litigation is pending while the stats indicate 7.8 mos to first office action and here we sit at almost 9 months with no first action. Coupled with the fact that there had been a prior re-exam resulting in a NIRC, he was going to look into the situation. I spoke with him again last week and basically what he said was that the examiner had a stack of re-exams on his desk and he would get to it when he gets to it!

I don't know about you but I am also frustrated with the entire system. Why make the MPEP publically available only to say that it was written a long time ago before the current volume of re-exams, then publish operational statistics that also cannot be relied upon. I realize that the ops stats are averages, however, coupled with the fact that this is the second re-exam with litigation pending, one would hope that this re-exam would move to the top of the examiners stack.

Today I called and asked to speak directly with the Acting Associate Commissioner. The woman I spoke with said that he is too busy to take phone calls and she referred me to the person I spoke with last week. I explained my conversation of last week to her and she suggesting writing directly to the Acting Associate Commissioner. She said he does read and respond to his e-mails.

I will pass this on to someone else to take the lead on this one.

robert.bahr@uspto.gov

.....good luck to all of us

Laurie