Attorney, Agent or Firm: the <agent rep-type="attorney"> attribute

One may be registered to practice before the USPTO as a patent attorney or as a patent agent (see generally 37 CFR §11.6).

In a previous post I considered this small extract from the <us-bibliographic-data-grant> element of the USPTO’s XML publication for United States Patent No. 8332851 and observed that the well known IP firm Fish & Richardson P.C. handled the prosecution of the application from which the ‘851 patent issued. Notice the rep-type="attorney" attribute in the <agent> element depicted here.

Does this mean that the rep-type attribute is populated to specify the attorney vs. agent registration status of the practitioner(s) who prosecuted the application from which the patent in question issued? If the answer is "yes" then we would expect to find some rep-type="agent" attributes within a reasonably large dataset.  Let's explore.

I ran this simple SQL query against a database I constructed from the USPTO’s XML bibliographic data for US patents which issued in 2012.  In plain English, the query says "show me the rep-type attribute for every practitioner record in the database, but ignore records with rep-type='attorney' ".  The query returned zero rows.  Therefore, every practitioner record in the database has rep-type="attorney". In other words, there are no occurrences of rep-type="agent", as one would expect if any of the XML documents used to construct the database had a rep-type="agent" attribute.

Does this mean that none of the US patents which issued in 2012 were prosecuted by a registered patent agent as opposed to a registered patent attorney? That seems unlikely, but we need a counter-example in order to reach a definitive conclusion.

Inventek is the Oakland, CA intellectual property service firm of Dr. Dov Rosenfeld, who is a registered US patent agent. This image (click the image to enlarge it) is a screen capture of a visualization I created via this blog's "Assignees & Attorneys" tab by typing "Inventek" in the "Search for Attorney or Agent:" box. The visualization shows that Inventek (Dr. Rosenfeld) prosecuted US patent applications which resulted in the grant of 32 US patents in 2012.

By way of example, one of those patents is US 8305996 which issued on 6 November 2012. The red-underlined portion of this partial image of the ‘996 patent’s cover sheet shows that the corresponding US patent application was prosecuted by Dr. Rosenfeld/Inventek.







This query result set (again, click the image to enlarge it) is based on the database mentioned above and shows some basic details of the 32 US patents which issued in 2012 from applications prosecuted by Dr. Rosenfeld. The "Representative Type" column again corresponds to the rep-type attribute and reveals that every document in the result set has rep-type="attorney". There are no occurrences of rep-type="agent".










It is thus apparent that the rep-type attribute in the USPTO’s bibliographic data is populated as rep-type="attorney" without regard to the practitioner’s registration classification (i.e. attorney vs. agent).  That's not surprising, since a practitioner's registration classification is not required in documents submitted to the USPTO in support of a US patent application.  For example, the Representative Information section of the USPTO's Application Data Sheet (shown here) can be configured to identify a specific practitioner by name and USPTO registration number, but the practitioner's registration classification is not required.  The same is true of the USPTO's Power of Attorney and Customer Number forms.

Attorney, Agent or Firm: the <agent> element

Some IP firms have multiple offices. Those firms’ internal docketing systems undoubtedly include detailed particulars of each patent case prosecuted by the firm, with an indication of which one of the firm’s offices is responsible for each case. Multi-office firms can accordingly use data mining techniques to develop metrics representative of various aspects of the operations of their different offices. However, that is feasible only for those with access to the data, i.e. the specific firms which have accumulated the data internally.

Can data mining techniques be applied to bibliographic patent data to develop metrics representative of the operations of different offices of a multi-office IP firm? Not directly.

Consider United States Patent No. 8332851 which issued on 11 December 2012 to SAP AG for an invention of Ostermeier et al. entitled Configuration and Execution of Mass Data Run Objects. The red-underlined portion of this partial image of the ‘851 patent’s cover sheet tells us that the corresponding US patent application was prosecuted by the well known IP firm Fish & Richardson P.C. As of this writing, Fish & Richardson P.C. has offices in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Dallas, Delaware, Houston, Munich, New York, Silicon Valley, Southern California, the Twin Cities and Washington, DC. Which one of Fish & Richardson’s 11 US offices handled the prosecution of the application from which the ‘851 patent issued?  The cover sheet does not tell us.

Now consider this small extract from the <us-bibliographic-data-grant> element of the USPTO’s XML publication for the ‘851 patent. The <us-bibliographic-data-grant> element encapsulates the <parties> element, which in turn encapsulates the <agents> element (as well as the <applicants> element). The <agent>, <addressbook>, <orgname>, <address> and <country> elements encapsulated and sub-encapsulated by the <agents> are sparsely populated. We see “Fish & Richardson P.C.” encapsulated by the <orgname></orgname> tag pair, but none of the other elements encapsulate data apart from the "attorney“ attribute in the <agent> element and the “unknown” text encapsulated by the <address><country></country><address> hierarchical tags. Is that “unknown" an aberration or a data glitch? No it is not.

This query result set is based on a database I constructed from the USPTO’s bibliographic data for US patents which issued in 2012. As can be seen, the rightmost “country" column (which corresponds to the aforementioned <address><country></country><address> hierarchical tags) contains the text “unknown” for every patent listed here. The same is true for the entire dataset. It is thus apparent that the bibliographic data does not tell us which one of the 11 US offices of Fish & Richardson P.C. handled the prosecution of the application from which the ‘851 patent issued. So which office was it?


The answer is the Dallas, Texas office. This is revealed by looking the case up via the USPTO’s public Patent Application Information Retrieval (i.e. public PAIR) system. Specifically, this portion of the filing transmittal for the application from which the ‘851 patent issued appears on the letterhead of the Fish & Richardson P.C. Dallas, Texas office (and also cites the firm’s Minneapolis office address; presumably to facilitate centralized docketing for all of the firm’s offices).

In summary, the USPTO’s bibliographic data identifies the “attorney, agent or firm” by name only. No address information (not even a county identifier) is provided, so it is not possible to discriminate between different offices of the same firm solely by reference to the bibliographic data.

Correlation of USPTO Art Units with IPC subclasses

What correlation, if any, is there between the art units to which the USPTO allocates patent applications for examination and the International Patent Classification subclasses allocated to the claimed inventions encompassed by the resultant patents? One would expect a fairly strong correlation, given the USPTO’s allocation of US patent classifications to art units and further in view of similarities between the IPC and US patent classification schemes.  For background, see the USPTO’s tabulation of US Patent Classes Arranged by Art Unit and its US patent classification to IPC concordance.

This scatter plot shows, along the horizontal axis, numbers of US patents which issued in 2012 for different USPTO art units; and along the horizontal axis, numbers of those patents in terms of their primary IPC subclasses; both of those measures being referenced to the assignee dimension (i.e. the parties to whom the patents issued).

The positive slope trend line reveals a strong positive correlation, as expected. The underlying trend model has an r² value of 0.843717, so r (the correlation value, in accordance with the Pearson correlation) is 0.92. Correlation values close to either +1 or -1 represent strong positive or negative correlation respectively between the measures being compared. Correlation values closer to zero represent weaker—or an absence of—correlation.

Office specific data elements

WIPO’s ST.36 Standard recommendation for the processing of patent information using XML includes a provision for so-called office-specific-data elements. These elements can be used to encapsulate details unique to a particular country in patent bibliographic data published for that country. ST.36 also provides alternative mechanisms for accomplishing the same thing, e.g. mixing office-specific elements with international common elements.

Let’s consider an example. United States patent no. 8260535 issued on 4 September 2012 to Bombardier Recreational Products Inc. of Valcourt, Québec, Canada for an invention of Mario Dagenais entitled "Load sensor for a vehicle electronic stability system". The ‘535 patent issued from United States patent application no. 11/864,265 which was filed on 28 September 2007.

As of this writing, an apparently corresponding Canadian patent application is pending, namely CA 2699332 which was published by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office as of 2 April 2009. The ‘332 application is a Canadian national counterpart of international application PCT/US2008/070129 which was filed on 16 July 2008 and claimed priority based upon the US ‘265 application. PCT/US2008/070129 was published on 2 April 2009 as WO2009/042276.

Consider this small extract from the <ca-bibliographic-data> element of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office’s XML publication for the ‘332 application. The <ca-bibliographic-data> element encapsulates the <publication-reference> element, which in turn encapsulates the <document-id> element. The <country>, <doc-number>, <kind> and <date> elements encapsulated by the <document-id> element identify this as Canadian patent application no. 2699332 published 2 April 2009, as aforesaid.

Now consider this corresponding small extract from the <us-bibliographic-data-grant> element of the USPTO’s XML publication for the ‘535 patent. Some structural similarities are evident: the <us-bibliographic-data-grant> element encapsulates the <publication-reference> element, which in turn encapsulates the <document-id> element. The <country>, <doc-number>, <kind> and <date> elements encapsulated by the <document-id> element identify this as United States patent no. 8260535 issued 4 September 2012, as aforesaid.

The foregoing are examples of international common elements.

Now consider this small extract from the <ca-office-specific-bib-data> element of the CIPO’s XML publication for the ‘332 application. Among other things, this encapsulates the <ca-license-for-sale> element.  This is a uniquely Canadian feature whereby a patentee may request that a patent be flagged as available for license or sale when details of that patent are published in the CIPO’s weekly Canadian Patent Office Record. In this case the <ca-license-for-sale> element encapsulates the word "false", indicating that no such flag has been raised in respect of the ‘332 application—not surprising since the ‘332 application has not issued as a Canadian patent as of this writing.

Finally, consider this small extract from the concluding portion of the <us-bibliographic-data-grant> element of the USPTO’s XML publication for the ‘535 patent. Here we have some uniquely American features identifying the primary examiner (Khoi Tran), the USPTO art unit (3664: robotics and vehicle controls) and the assistant examiner (Bhavesh V. Amin) for the ‘535 patent.

We can thus see that the CIPO has opted to implement ST.36 by assigning office-specific-data elements to encapsulate details unique to Canada, whereas the USPTO implements ST.36 by mixing office-specific elements with international common elements.