Q: What's the average length of time for a patent application to be reviewed and approved?
A:
The time for a utility patent application to receive a First Action On Merits (FOAM in PTO lingo) varies greatly. The FOAM is the first substantive comparison of the pending claims against the prior art and the various rules for how patent claims should be written. This is known as a Office Action.
One of the smart things the PTO does is divide up the incoming patent applications so that person handling new dishwasher patent applications is different from the person reviewing a new cancer drug. That means that there are different queue lengths depending on what group within the PTO has been assigned to review the application.
The goal is to get a FOAM in 14 months but I have had to wait 4 and 5 years for some patent applications. To the extent that the PTO misses the 14 month target an extra day is added to the patent term for each day they miss the target. This is called Patent Term Adjustment (PTA).
Once you get an initial rejection, it takes a few months to respond and then the PTO takes a few months to respond. This can go on for several cycles. Thus the target is to get the process wrapped up in 3 years but often that target is missed. There are PTA days available to extend the patent term but the PTA process is complicated and tries to ensure that a long delay is not counted twice for missing the 14 month window and for missing the 3 year window.
The PTA process will also decrement the PTA total if the applicant is slow in doing certain actions such as asking for an extension of time. The goal is to get you approximately 17 years of patent term but this is a very rough process. It is not unusual to get more than 1000 days of PTA.
Some companies are in a hurry to get the patent application reviewed quickly. There are a wide range of ways to do this. I give a summary of some of the ways to accelerate the process at https://www.flynniplaw.com/services/legal-services/accelerating-patent-applications . But for this answer, it is useful to know that you can accelerate the process so that you should get the process done in a year by filing a Track One request at filing and paying the fee to accelerate. $2000 for a small entity and $1000 for a micro entity.
I hope this helps.
Kevin E Flynn
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