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.
