u/ipman457678

First time I've seen this ever.

Original claims were restricted between Invention 1 and Invention 2. In responding to a restriction, Applicant elected Invention I and submitted amendments adding new claims directed to a random, relatively new invention - Invention 3. (new with respect to the restriction requirement, but is 112(a) written description compliant).

Now "restriction by original presentation" would not be in order since I have not issued the first non-final (i.e., action on the merits). So I don't think I can write the first non-final and just withdraw the invention 3 invoking "restriction by original presentation." Do I just issue another, consecutive restriction restricting Invention 1 and 3? I've never done restrictions back to back. Is that done in the office?

EDIT:

After reading some relies and looking into the MPEP, I believe I was incorrect to think that "restriction by original presentation" can only occur after FOAM.

MPEP 818.02(a) states "Where claims to another invention are properly added and entered in the application before the earlier of the mailing of a first restriction requirement or the mailing of a first Office action on the merits, those claims, along with the ones presented upon filing the application, will be considered originally presented claims for purposes of restriction only."

The MPEP is poorly written and confusing in this regard. For the most part it always uses "after receiving an action on the merits of an invention" as if that was the only requirement to (i.e., it seems in some MPEP sections it simply forgets that a first restriction requirement can also be used to define what is original presentation material).

So because the third invention was added after I issued the first restriction requirement, the third invention is NOT considered "originally presentation" claims and can be restricted by original presentation.

Less time to examine, increased production quota , increased downtime due to IT issues = less quality

If you’re on a PIP for production and/or constantly barely meeting production, you’re not adjusting your quality according - you’re keeping your old standards static as everything around you is giving you less time. Oh you’re a “professional” and refuse to submit inferior work that you're capable of - good luck on your sinking ship, the “U.S.S. Too Prideful”

I dont want to do subpar work and rather do shit im proud of, but that's not possible. The agency has made it impossible. These times it's survival mode. Do what you gotta do ethically and don’t be taken advantage of by not making necessarily adjustment to real life constraints.

Hence, the first resistance point you should hit is quality issues, not production. On a normal bi-week, you should be working 80hrs a bi-week (and not a minute more) and making 100% production. Whatever work product you can achieve in that 80rs is what it is. If you get hit with errors, THEN you can start figuring out how and if it's possible to increase quality to their standards while keeping the 100% production.

Quality should be the moving variable in all this and production is static - most of you got it wrong and doing the opposite opposite where quality is static and production is the moving variable.

At least on this sub, this policy is such a big ass point of contention. I'm not sure how the rest of the 7k examiners in real life (I'm gonna assume only 1k of sub are actual active examiners - I'm pulling this number out of my ass) feel about it. Maybe they are indifferent. I personally know of one examiner who was more pissed off about this than when they effectively increased production to 100%.

But if sub's scorn for this policy generally reflects entire examining corps feeling about this issue as a whole, the smart play from management is to simply reverse this policy. It's such a rare and niche occurrence that rarely happens but is causing such a disproportional amount of friction and low morale from examiners it's not worth the value it potentially brings in to the agency. Like I'm perplexed as why would they keep this policy considering all the bad blood it generates vs the small ass amount of "profit" the agency would gain form it.

I suspect there's no better way to this but I'll see if the hivemind can think of something I didn't think of.

The goal is to refresh my current searches and see if anything new has populated since the last search - usually I do this in preparing in allowances when the applicants has brought up allowable subject matter and I'm satisfied with my old search syntax, no need search syntax needed.

Simplified example: Let's say I have these search strings I did for the FAOM, where the number of hits are in parenthesis.

L1 (5)

L2 (489)

L3 (0)

L4 (38)

L5 (879)

L6 (3)

Amendments come in, I just need to fresh my current L strings. So the way I've been doing it is just hitting "Refresh All" and just eyeball comparing the new L and hits:

L7 (8)

L8 (490)

L9 (1)

L10 (38)

L11 (879)

L12 (5)

So in this case L7 is a refreshed version of L1, and it has 3 additional hits so I know to go into browse L7 and review those new hits. Samething applies to L8, L9, L12.

The hits qt for L4/L10, and L5/L11 didn't change so I don't even bother looking at those updated searches.

Problem is this is cumbersome as hell because (1) you gotta do math to map the L's depending on what last L number was and (2) scrolling up/down the UI window to view the L's is inefficient.

Anybody think of a faster way to do this?