The United States Patent and Trademark Elijah J. McCoy Midwest Regional Office (USPTO), as part of our continuing efforts to improve patent examination quality and efficiency, is hosting a roundtable on October 27, 2016 to discuss new ways to more efficiently identify prior art for patent applications.

The roundtable discussion will include leveraging electronic resources (e.g., Global Dossier and USPTO internal databases) to automatically import relevant information (e.g., prior art and search reports) into pending U.S. applications from sources, such as domestic parent and counterpart foreign applications. As outlined in our Federal Register Notice, we are streamlining the patent examination process for both examiners and applicants. It will be critical to ensure our examiners are provided with the most relevant information without being overburdened with immaterial or marginally relevant information. Automatically importing this information should reduce the burden on applicants providing materials to us.

This roundtable is part of an extensive stakeholder outreach initiative to help us better understand the needs of applicants, such as how this system should be controlled and what information should be documented relative to the imported information (e.g., date, source, examiner consideration, etc.). We hope to hear from you on this initiative and invite you to register and attend our upcoming roundtable on in Chicago, Illinois.