Try rolling these out at the bar tonight. You’ll be the life of the party!
Here goes:
- The USPTO issued its 10,000,000th patent on Tuesday June 19, 2018. That’s 10 million patents. The 10 millionth patent is owned by Raytheon and addresses LADAR range-finding technology, as used in self-driving cars.
- In 1997, the USPTO issued about 100,000 patents. In 2007 the USPTO issued about 150,000 patents. In 2017 the USPTO issued about 300,000 patents. You can see which way this is going.
The following are from an April, 2018 talk by USPTO Patent Commissioner Hirshfeld:
- The U.S. currently has 8,200 patent examiners.
- Invention owners filed 450,000 new patent applications in 2017.
- The average time to first office action for a US patent application is down to 15 months. The average time to patent issuance is 24 months. (YMMV – Your mileage May Vary). Some of our clients have MUCH OLDER pending cases
— Robert Yarbrough, Esq.