United States Patent and Trademark Office - Structure

Structure

The PTO is headquartered at the USPTO Campus, consisting of 11 buildings in a city-like development surrounded by ground floor retail and highrise residential buildings between the King Street and Eisenhower Avenue Metro stations in Alexandria, Virginia. An additional building in Arlington, Virginia was opened in 2009. By 2014, the PTO will open offices in Detroit, Dallas, Denver, and Silicon Valley to reduce backlog and reflect regional industrial strengths.

The "first ever" satellite office opened in Detroit on July 13, 2012.

As of September 30, 2009 (2009 -09-30), the end of the U.S. government's fiscal year, the PTO had 9,716 employees, nearly all of whom are based at its five-building headquarters complex in Alexandria. Of those, 6,242 were patent examiners (almost all of whom were assigned to examine utility patents; only 99 were assigned to examine design patents) and 388 were trademark examining attorneys; the rest are support staff. While the agency has noticeably grown in recent years, the rate of growth was far slower in fiscal 2009 than in the recent past; this is borne out by data from fiscal 2005 to the present:

Patent examiners make up the bulk of the employees at USPTO. They are generally newly graduated scientists and engineers, recruited from various universities around the nation. They hold degrees in various scientific disciplines, but who do not necessarily hold law degrees. Unlike patent examiners, trademark examiners must be licensed attorneys. All examiners work under a strict, "count"-based production system. For every application, "counts" are earned by composing, filing, and mailing a first Office action on the merits, and upon disposal of an application.

The Commissioner for Patents oversees three main bodies, headed by former Deputy Commissioner for Patent Operations, currently Peggy Focarino, the Deputy Commissioner for Patent Examination Policy, currently Andrew Hirshfeld as Acting Deputy, and finally the Commissioner for Patent Resources and Planning, which is currently vacant. The Patent Operations of the office is divided into nine different technology centers that deal with various arts.

Decisions of patent examiners may be appealed to the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences, an administrative law body of the USPTO. Decisions of the BPAI may further be appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, or a civil suit may be brought against the Commissioner of Patents in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. The United States Supreme Court may ultimately decide on a patent case. Similarly, decisions of trademark examiners may be appealed to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, with subsequent appeals directed to the Federal Circuit, or a civil action may also be brought.

In recent years, the USPTO has seen increasing delays between when a patent application is filed and when it issues. To address its workload challenges, the USPTO has undertaken an aggressive program of hiring and recruitment. The USPTO hired 1,193 new patent examiners In Fiscal Year 2006 (year ending September 30, 2006), 1,215 new examiners in fiscal 2007, and 1,211 in fiscal year 2008. The USPTO expected to continue hiring patent examiners at a rate of approximately 1,200 per year through 2012; however, due to a slowdown in new application filings since the onset of the late-2000s economic crisis, and projections of substantial declines in maintenance fees in coming years, the agency imposed a hiring freeze in early March 2009.

In 2006, USPTO instituted a new training program for patent examiners called the "Patent Training Academy." It is an eight-month program designed to teach new patent examiners the fundamentals of patent law, practice and examination procedure in a college-style environment. Because of the impending USPTO budget crisis previously alluded to, it had been rumored that the Academy would be closed by the end of 2009. Focarino, then Acting Commissioner for Patents, denied in a May 2009 interview that the Academy was being shut down, but stated that it would be cut back because the hiring goal for new examiners in fiscal 2009 was reduced to 600. Ultimately, 588 new patent examiners were hired in fiscal year 2009.