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.