On Wednesday, June 4, 2008, the State Bar of Georgia will hold a panel discussion entitled “The Patent Toolkit: Tools to Keep On Hand to Protect and Enforce Intellectual Property”. Panelists for the discussion are made up of a diverse group of Georgia lawyers, some of which practice in the Atlanta area. Topics to be discussed include how to protect and enforce intellectual property rights as well as the role intellectual property plays in business decisions. The discussion will be held at Kilpatrick Stockton LLP, located on 1100 Peachtree Street, Atlanta, starting at 11:45AM. Registration is required for entry into the panel discussion and the payment deadline for registration is May 30, 2008. 404-527-8774 phone; 404-527-8749 fax

No more than three independent claims and no more than twenty total claims may be included in the patent application being accelerated and the claims must be directed to a single invention. No multiple dependent claims are allowed. If there is more than one invention, the examiner will telephone the applicant or his patent attorney to restrict to a single invention. No traverse (argument why the restriction is not applicable) will be permitted. Office actions must be responded to by the applicant and will be turned around by the examiner on an accelerated schedule. For non-final actions, the response by the applicant must be made within one month or the application will go abandoned. For final actions or allowances, the respective response or issue fee payment must be made within three months.

A petition fee is not required for patent applications that are directed to improvement of the environment, conserving or developing energy, or to fight terrorism.

In order to accelerate the examination process, it is necessary to petition the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) to make a patent application special. Any application for which acceleration is requested must have been filed electronically along with the petition. This means that, if the petition is allowed, the patent application will be picked up and examined out of turn before other non-special applications. The goal of this process is to reach allowance of the application within one year (it will become a patent once the fee is paid).

Since August, 2006, the patent application to be accelerated must be accompanied with a search report, including both U.S. patent and foreign patent reference sources and non-patent literature, and an accelerated examination support document that, among other things, spells out for the USPTO examiner what the references contain and how they apply to the claims. The only exceptions are for advanced age or poor health of the applicant or if the patent application is part of the Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH).