Making Progress with Difficult Patent Applications

Brief:

Some patent applications are difficult to get through the patent office. Examiners won't allow them and inventors won't abandon them. The net result is that office actions and responses go back and forth between patent examiners and inventors' patent attorneys or agents with no apparent resolution in sight. This can take years. The costs can be substantial. Progress with these difficult patent applications can be made by comparing them to other applications in the same technologies that seem to get through the patent office much faster. Details on these faster applications can be found in the USPTO's ³public PAIR² web site. The public PAIR web site has the complete file histories of all correspondence between the patent office and inventors' attorneys or agents. These file histories can be reviewed to see what techniques others are using get their applications allowed. Those same techniques can be applied to an inventor's own applications. Attendees will learn how PAIR works, how to review file histories, how to pick out the winning strategies to get faster allowance and lower total legal costs.

About the speaker:

Mark Nowotarski is the President of Markets, Patents & Alliances L.L.C. and is a registered U.S. patent agent. He has served clients in the medical devices, personal safety, consumer products, homeland security, and financial services industries. Mark is a former Associate Director of R&D for Praxair. There he was responsible for the development and successful worldwide introduction of new products into the environmental, electronics, metals and food industries. His initiatives generated over $300 million in sales.

Mark is an inventor on 17 US patents. He was appointed Corporate Research Fellow for the commercial impact of his inventions. Mark has a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford and a Bachelor's degree with honors in Aerospace, Mechanical Sciences and Engineering Physics from Princeton. His academic awards include the Sigma Xi award for most outstanding Mechanical Engineering research at Princeton and the Union Carbide Award for Academic Excellence and Leadership in Mechanical Engineering, also at Princeton. Mark has been quoted as a patent expert in The New York Times, Stamford Advocate, and Bloomberg Wealth Manager. He was also recently interviewed on NEWS 12 regarding the dramatic growth of patents in social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.