by Dennis Crouch
The Request for Continued Examination has become the ordinary answer to a final rejection. An RCE lets an applicant reopen prosecution and keep working with the same examiner by paying a fee, rather than filing a fresh application or taking the case up to the Board. Weekly RCE filings are following something of a wave, with a high point in 2016 and 2017, before dropping and now rising again. It is not clear to me what is causing the recent rise in RCE filings over the past year.
One dramatic outlier in the series is old: the last week of October 2007 drew nearly 7,000 RCEs as applicants raced to file ahead of the PTO’s new caps on continued examination, caps that Judge Cacheris enjoined the day before they took effect. Tafas v. Dudas, 511 F. Supp. 2d 652 (E.D. Va. 2007).
The second chart here adds parallel numbers for patent issuances and abandonments.
