Hovey Williams, LLP

Many businesses have excellent ideas for new products for which a demand exists, but often lack the expertise or tools necessary to take these ideas from the drawing board to the marketplace. The Advanced Manufacturing Institute (AMI) of Manhattan, Kansas, is an organization affiliated with Kansas State University that offers a wide variety of services to help companies and individuals engineer solutions and develop new products for commercialization. AMI draws upon the resources of a talented team of experts in engineering, product design, manufacturing, and business that work side-by-side with its clients to meet their specific goals.

For those of you who are also patent attorneys, most of us have been there.  A provisional application was filed 364 days ago, and, for whatever reason, you are just now able to start working on the corresponding non-provisional application.  There’s just one problem: the inventor is on vacation (or sabbatical, or retired, or ignoring you), and you just have to have more time.  So, what to do?  One option could be to file a second provisional application, which can be done without completely foregoing your foreign priority rights.

One of the most perplexing problems faced by patent applicants today is the lengthy pendency of patent applications, or the time between the date of filing and the actual issuance of a patent.  This issue has very real economic significance.  The life of a U.S. patent is 20 years, measured from the first date of filing, regardless of when the patent actually issues.  While undue delays in the Patent Office are supposedly offset by additional term, this occurs at the end of the patent term when the invention may be obsolete or no longer commercial.  The statistics on Patent Office delays are daunting.

The patent prosecution changes are intended to deal with issues currently being tackled by the European Patent Office (EPO) within its “Raising the Bar” Project.  Generally, these changes apply to directly-filed European patent applications and international applications entering the regional phase before the EPO.  Important changes include:

• Decreased time limits for filing divisional applications
• New fee structure
• Requirements for responding to Search Reports and Written Opinions

Through our efforts to provide exceptional client service and keep you current on our recent firm activities, we are providing this section with the latest news and recent developments from Hovey Williams. In this issue you will find information about:

• Our People in the News
• Our Firm in the News
• Drawing Winners from Our Recent Trip to the Solo and Small Firm Conference