Patent procurement at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is affected by the type of examiner.
We gathered data from the LexisNexis PatentAdvisor database for each year from 2009 to 2019, for examiners in each of eight nondesign Tech Centers at the USPTO. Examiners are categorized into three different types, and the data shows that certain types of examiners allow disproportionately more and examine disproportionately more U.S. patents each year than other types of examiners, resulting in few allowing many, and many allowing few.