Monday, June 30, 2014

New resource for searching and analyzing PTAB decisions

There's a great new resource available for practitioners interested in PTAB decisions: the Patent Board Ferret.

The Ferret includes both search and analysis tools. On the search side, you can search not only by text in the decision, but also by rejection type, disposition, art unit, Examiner, and decision date. On the analysis side, you can generate charts which answer questions like:
do some judge panels introduce new 101 rejections more than others?
do some Examiners have a high reversal rate for section 112?
do cases with oral hearings have a higher rate of reversal?

While the Ferret hasn't processed every single one of the decisions on the PTAB's official site, it does include almost 13000 decisions, and continues to grow. So the Ferret is now my default search engine for PTAB decisions.

I do still use ptab.us to quickly look at recent decisions of interest to me. ptab.us shows me all decisions issued on a particular day, along with Examiner name, Correspondent Name (i.e. law firm or sometimes corporation), issues decided, and disposition. ptab.us has some analysis features too: it can generate spreadsheets for decisions by judge, law firm, tech center, etc.