The USPTO lists 42,000 registered patent practitioners (including both patent attorneys and patent agents). The chart above groups those practitioners by registration year. The most recent enrollees are Thomas Dunham, Alexander Farrell, Erin Foley, and Mark Metzke. Congratulations.
The following chart shows the percentage of patent attorneys who list an employer on the USPTO Registration Information.
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Patent Practitioners – Patent Law Blog (Patently-O)
Those numbers are likely to be erroneous. I know several attorneys who were agents first and never bothered to get their status changed at the PTO.
Perhaps a chart in the same character showing the number of examiners…?
I confirm. I used the name 6 in reference to the comments by 1st and 3rd. I am so sorry, true 6. I didn’t want to usurp your identity.
^ that poster is actually not me.
Yeah, I’d like to know that as well for Patent Attorneys and Patent Agents both combined and separately.
It’s still a small club… and I like it that way.
Seems like the 2013 numbers are relatively low. The exam does seem to be testing a little harder with the AIA rules in place now. I have a few more weeks of studying to do.
I wonder how many are actually active too. I suspect a lot of these are not active. Certainly from what I’ve seen people get the registration number and then go into litigation.
Any chance we could see a graph of the number of registered patent practitioners as a function of time (rather than grouped by year)?
Note the nice bump up in ’98 registrations when the exam went from Examiner graded (pre ’97 exams) to machine graded.
I think so. EPA are only entitled to act in front of EPO (not national courts). So they are not entitled to represent their client in infrignement law suit (the lawyer are). But this may change soon because according to the draft agreement on the Unified Patent Court, EPA with a special additional qualification should be entitled to represent their clients in front of UPC (which should replace national courts for patent litigations).
Just to add a little bit of complexity a lawyer can represent his client in front of EPO. So perhaps “10,000” should not be compared to “42,000”.
more U.S. patent attorneys are involved in litigation than in Europe?
And boy can you ever feel that 2000-2005 run up in the market rates of prosecution.
Bob, I agree with you. There’s no other explanation.
BTW, congratulations to Thomas, Alexander, Erin and Mark, who have read the whole MPEP.
It’s because our MPEP is longer.
It is interesting to compare the number of patent agents/attorneys in USA (42,000) with the number of European patent attorneys (10,000). You may ask why is it interesting ? Well…I don’t know, I just wanted to be the first to comment this post.
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