USPTO Issues Annual Report for Fiscal 2007

In case you missed it, on November 15, 2007, the USPTO issued its Performance and Accountability Report for Fiscal Year 2007 (downloadable here). The Report states that "Our Trademark organization continued to demonstrate excellence today and outstanding planning for tomorrow. For the second year in a row, Trademarks met or exceeded all of its performance goals." At the recent PTO Day conference, Commissioner for Trademarks Lynne G. Beresford provided attendees with the impressive statistics regarding the PTO's Trademark Operations (TTABlogged here).


The PTO Report highlights the following:

• USPTO's trademark examining attorneys examined a record 323,527 applications.
• Quality was 97.4 percent.
• The quality results exceeded fiscal year 2007 targets.
• The average time from filing an initial trademark application to a preliminary decision from an examining attorney (first action) was below 3 months.
• Slightly more than 95 percent of initial trademark applications were filed electronically in 2007, including international filings.

With regard to our favorite tribunal, the Report states:

The USPTO successfully defended the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board's (TTAB) decision in In re Elsevier, denying registration of the mark "LAWYERS.COM" for an online legal information service. The Federal Circuit determined that the mark was generic for legal information services. [TTABlogged here].

Furthering the Agency's leadership in IP law, both the BPAI [Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences] and the TTAB increased their issuance of precedential decisions, with the TTAB issuing over 60 such decisions, and the BPAI issuing landmark decisions providing early guidance on applying KSR. In addition, this past year, both boards issued or proposed new rules designed to streamline case resolution and improve the efficiency of the decision-making process.