by Bill Vobach
It appears that the USPTO currently designates about 101 opinions of the Board as precedential. There are also a good number of informative opinions. It occurs to me that an interesting seminar topic (e.g., for a Strafford program) might be summarizing the more interesting of these opinions, particularly the ones that apply to every day prosecution issues. There’s an amazing number of precedential opinions directed to interferences — so, one could drop those out of the mix. Similarly, there are so many directed to AIA proceedings that they could form their own seminar. But, it would be interesting to see a seminar that touches on the remaining important cases relating to prosecution.
One example might be Ex parte Smith, et al.