On June 25, Bloomberg Law spoke to KellDann founding partner Kirk Sigmon regarding patent ethics and conflict of interest issues within the USPTO. As detailed in the Bloomberg article, a USPTO examiner paid $500,000 to resolve conflict of interest allegations relating to their work examining patents assigned to companies that the patent examiner allegedly invested in.
Kirk’s comments focused on the ramifications of the examiner’s alleged conflict of interest issues:
Getting a patent boosts your bottom line, Sigmon said, but “now you have these very serious black marks on those patents that are going to make it harder to assert, not only because you have this issue of the examiner being unfair, but also because now you don’t quite know how these are going to be fire tested.”
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The PTO’s staffing shortage is likely hampering those types of efforts, Sigmon said. Still, stakeholders would appreciate more transparency from the agency about how these cases are handled, he said.
“It scares me a little bit, because it’s going to be harder for me to definitively tell my clients that the USPTO is playing fair, unless they come out and provide more details on this, and how they’ve done something to fix it,” he said.
Kirk’s PatentAgility System Indicated Issues Early On
Kirk’s own PatentAgility system, a free and open-source AI-enabled toolkit, might itself indicate that the examiner in question was unusually favorable. According to PatentAgility, the examiner in question, Daxin Wu, was “Very Easy” relative to their group, TC, and the USPTO as a whole:
