Intellectual Property

A July 1996 GAO report (GAO/RCED-96-190) provided statistics on "patent pendency," of the amount of time that the Patent and Trademark Office takes to examine a patent application. This report updates those statistics and compares pendency for fiscal year 1994 and 1995. Specifically, GAO discusses overall pendency; patent pendency by examination groups, secrecy orders, foreign applications, and current and original application dates; and patent pendency attributable to applicants.

GAO noted that: (1) patent pendency declined slightly in fiscal year (FY) 1995 in comparison with FY 1994; (2) overall average pendency in FY 1995 was 19.8 months, or 0.4 month less than the 20.2-month average for FY 1994; (3) similarly, pendency declined somewhat for 8 of the 17 examination groups and for foreign applications; (4) pendency remained about the same when the original rather than the current application filing date was used for the calculation; (5) pendency for applications subject to secrecy orders increased, but these applications were so few in number that they had virtually no effect on overall pendency; and (6) GAO also found that the average amount of pendency attributable to the applicant increased from 7.4 months in FY 1994 to 8 months in FY 1995.