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Methodology · Public

Every number on this site, defended.

Every metric we publish comes from public USPTO records. Below is exactly how each is computed, what sample size is required before we display it, and where the data has known gaps. Every profile these numbers appear on is listed in the examiner directory.

The headline read

The four numbers fixed above every profile: refusal, escalation, withdrawal, difficulty. Each leads with its plain-English answer; the formula is one click away.

01

Initial refusal rate · over examined apps

Coverage gate · ≥10 fetched-OA apps AND ≥0.33 fetch coverage

Of the applications this examiner examined, the share that drew a substantive refusal: §2(d), descriptiveness, surname, geographic, or another substantive ground. Procedural-only actions don't count, and a docket-noise filter drops backlog re-examinations and abandoned pro se floods. The base counts approvals the examiner granted without ever writing a refusal: first-action allowances (the only record is the allowance milestone) and no-paper approvals (straight to publication, or resolved by an examiner's amendment with no office action at all). Those are the examiner's cleanest outcomes; a base that skipped them would over-state refusal posture most for exactly the most approval-prone examiners (redefined 2026-07-24: the prior OA-only base read the corps at ~47%; the examined-apps base reads ~30%). Profile headlines read this same formula over the last two years (labeled "Last 2 yrs," gated at n ≥ 30), with the full-record rate alongside. The by-year chart and its one-line read draw the last five complete years: the in-progress year is excluded (its partial-year denominator can invert a direction), and earlier years stay in the career figure rather than the chart, because per-year coverage thins with age and a long window reads that thinning as a trend.

Show the formulaHide the formula
Initial refusal rate
  =  apps that drew at least one substantive office action
     ÷  examined apps
        (real-OA apps  +  first-action allowances
         +  attributed no-paper approvals)
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
Refusal detection still needs classified text: the substantive share is measured on the fetched-and-classified sample (suppressed below 10 such apps or under a third fetch coverage) and stated over the full examined base; approvals without a refusal carry zero refusals by construction, so they enter the denominator only. No-paper approvals count as attributed: an app with no office action is tied to its examiner through the case-file header, which the pipeline captures whenever USPTO activity touches the file, near-complete for recent work, far thinner for approvals from the early 2010s. That early gap is structural, not temporal: the bulk USPTO records for roughly 2007 to 2014 mostly carry no examiner attribution at all (about 3% of those years' approvals attribute, measured after a complete backfill), so it does not close as coverage grows. The practical effect: early no-paper approvals missing from the examined base can push a career refusal rate high by one to three points for examiners whose careers weight those years. Recent-window figures are unaffected, and the formula itself does not change.Why the docket-noise filter exists, with the numbers. One active-corps examiner-year reads 11.2% on a naive per-action count (526 non-final and final actions) between years at 40.5% and 43.3%, because a flood of requirement-only first actions on foreign pro se filings filled the base. A requirement is not a refusal, so the classifier is right and the denominator is the trap. On this formula the same three years read 36.0%, 17.2% and 40.0%. The filter drops 270 of the 613 applications that drew a first action that year, the abandoned pro se flood, but not the flood filings that went on to register, and the record cannot say whether the residual is the docket or the examiner. The research brief that told this story as “no change in the examiner” was withdrawn on September 16, 2026 for that reason.
02

Escalation rate (Final | merits-resolved)

Sample-size gate · n ≥ 10 merits-resolved refusals AND ≥0.33 fetch coverage

Of the refusals where this examiner revealed their posture, pushed to a Final or approved the mark, the share pushed to Final. Read the other way, how often they back down. Conditioning on a refusal keeps applicant quality out of the denominator; conditioning on a merits decision keeps applicant persistence out too. A refusal abandoned before the examiner ever decided says nothing about the examiner, so it sits out of both sides (the same rule the §2(d) escalation rate has always used: abandonment is an applicant decision, never an examiner statistic). The approved side is ordering-checked: an approval stamped before the refusal ever issued reflects an earlier examination pass, so it counts as a back-down only when the mark went on to register, and otherwise leaves the denominator. Redefined 2026-07-23: previously the denominator was all refused apps, which diluted the rate with uncontested abandonments; the merits-resolved read runs roughly twice the diluted one.

Show the formulaHide the formula
Escalation rate
  =  refused apps pushed to at least one Final Office Action
     ÷  refused apps where the examiner showed their hand
        (pushed to Final  OR  approved the mark after the refusal)
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
Escalation counts whether a refusal reached a Final at all, not how many non-final rounds it ran first. An examiner who writes the Final on the first answer and one who takes three non-final rounds to get there score the same here; the OA rounds figure in the fine print carries the pace.
03

Withdrawn when contested

Sample-size gate · n ≥ 10 contested resolved refused apps · fetch-coverage ≥ 0.33 · maturity ≥ 12 mo and ≥ 30 resolved apps

Of the refusals an applicant contested, at least one response on file: the share that still reached approval. This is the base rate for the decision an attorney is making: a client drew a refusal from this examiner: the odds it comes off if they respond.

Show the formulaHide the formula
Withdrawn when contested
  =  contested refused apps that still reached Approved-for-Publication
     ÷  refused apps with at least one response filed
        that reached terminal disposition (approved or abandoned)
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
Contesting and then abandoning counts against the figure; a loss by attrition is still a loss. Refusals abandoned without any response sit out of both sides: about two in five refused applications never respond (heavily pro se), only about 3% of withdrawals ever come from that group, and counting them measured the examiner's docket demographics rather than anyone's odds (redefined 2026-07-23; the unconditioned read was ~37%, the contested read is ~65%). Pending applications are excluded from both sides. Two ordering guards keep the numerator honest: an approval stamped before the refusal ever issued counts as a recovery only when the mark went on to register (otherwise the app scores by its terminal disposition), and refusals younger than 18 months sit out entirely; an in-progress cohort resolves its fast approvals first and would read several points high. Suppressed below the same fetch-coverage gate as the refusal rate and the lifecycle maturity gate (a new examiner's resolved-refused docket skews toward fast abandonments). Below its gates the tile says "Building" and names its sample rather than guessing a percentage.
04

Difficulty decile

Gate · n ≥ 30 apps + a published refusal rate · §2(d) hold & post-Final axes n ≥ 25 · appeal axis ≥ 15 resolved

A 1 to 10 decile of how hard this examiner is to overcome, ranked across the active examining corps (active = an office action in the last 365 days). It scores winnability: how firmly they hold a §2(d) at Final, how rarely they withdraw after Final, whether refusals stick through a Board appeal, not raw refusal frequency, which mostly reflects the docket they were handed.

Show the formulaHide the formula
composite  =  0.35 · z(holds at Final · §2(d) + general)
           +  0.25 · z(won't withdraw post-Final §2(d))
           +  0.20 · z(refusal rate, basis-adjusted)
           +  0.12 · z(sticks through TTAB appeal)
           +  0.08 · z(office-action rounds)

(weights renormalize over the pillars an examiner has;
 a thin appeal or post-Final record drops out rather than
 pulling the score toward the median; basis-adjusted
 refusal is always present. The post-Final withdrawal and
 appeal axes are empirical-Bayes shrunk toward the corps
 mean so a tiny sample can't swing the score.)

appeal-resistance
  =  appeals where the refusal was upheld
     ÷  resolved appeals
        (upheld + refusal withdrawn after appeal + reversed)

decile     =  this examiner's rank, in tenths, across the
              active corps, sorted by composite ascending
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
The prior score was refusal-led (0.50 weight) and tracked raw refusal rate at ~0.81: it largely measured the docket an examiner was handed, not their disposition. This rewrite leads with winnability and keeps basis-adjusted refusal as a minor 0.20 pillar; on the active corps the decile's tie to raw refusal rate falls to ~0.52, so an examiner who refuses often but withdraws easily reads as winnable, not hard. We deliberately exclude withdrawal when contested: it is the profile's headline outcome, and scoring it here would double-count. Decile 8 reads as "harder to overcome than 70% of active examiners, weighing hold-at-Final, post-Final withdrawal, refusal frequency, and whether refusals stick through appeal." The composite itself is reliable (0.904 across full corps resamples), but the ten-band dial is not precise to one band: the printed decile reproduces about half of resamples, and a typical 95% range spans about four bands. Read the tier word as the verdict and the decile as a location on the dial, stable to about two bands either side. Tier mapping: Easy 1-3 / Medium 4-7 / Hard 8-10.

The §2(d) playbook

Read in prosecution order: initial, Final, appeal. Then the per-case playbook report.

Initial

§2(d) escalation / back-down rate

Coverage gate (≥0.33 fetched) + n ≥ 10 merits-resolved §2(d)

When this examiner opens with a §2(d) and the matter reaches a merits decision, the share they push to Final; read the other way, how often they back down first. The opening-move number, before a single response is filed.

Show the formulaHide the formula
§2(d) escalation rate
  =  §2(d) applications the examiner pushed to a Final
     ÷  §2(d) applications that reached a merits decision
        (made Final  OR  approved without a §2(d) Final)

Back-down rate = 100% − escalation rate (the same statistic, read the other way).
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
The denominator is merits-resolved §2(d)s only: applications the applicant abandoned without the examiner ever reaching a Final, and still-pending applications, are excluded from both sides; abandonment is an applicant decision, never an examiner statistic. Escalation and back-down are exact complements over that set, so we publish one number, not two. An escalation additionally requires the Final itself to still carry the §2(d): a Final whose classified grounds dropped the §2(d) counts as a back-down even though the application finaled on another ground. This is not the round-1 §2(d) count: a §2(d) Final is not a subset of round-1 §2(d)s (about 5 to 7% of §2(d) Finals first appear as a non-final §2(d) at a later round), so the two counts are never drawn as a funnel. One composition caveat: the rate correlates with cohort era (newer examiners escalate more corps-wide), so part of any one examiner's gap vs the corps can reflect when they were hired, not only temperament.

Initial

§2(d) co-traveling grounds rate

Coverage gate (≥0.33 fetched) + n ≥ 10 §2(d) apps

Of the applications this examiner hits with a §2(d), the share where it arrives alongside another substantive ground on the same office action. A §2(d) alone, or a multi-front response.

Show the formulaHide the formula
§2(d) co-travel rate
  =  §2(d) apps whose §2(d) shares an office action with another substantive ground
     ÷  apps that drew a §2(d) from this examiner
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
Per-application, not per-office-action: an app counts once if any of its §2(d) office actions carries a co-traveling substantive ground. Procedural-only accompaniments (specimen, disclaimer requirements) don't count. Read it as a docket-and-habit blend, not a fixed trait: examiners separate cleanly on this rate at any moment, but an individual's figure drifts more over their career than the other posture rates, so a career figure describes the record, not a prediction of the next filing.

Final · the anchor

§2(d) post-Final withdrawal rate (· when answered)

Computed from n ≥ 10 · shown as a rate at n ≥ 25 answered, resolved Finals, smoothed toward the corps mean with the same K = 40 pseudo-count the difficulty score uses

Among this examiner's Final §2(d) refusals that the applicant answered, the share where the §2(d) came off and the application reached Approved-for-Publication. The single most actionable number at the answer-or-abandon decision. It answers the question you would face: whether going back at this Final clears it. Redefined 2026-07-23: roughly half of resolved §2(d) Finals are never answered at all, and a walk-away is an applicant decision, never an examiner statistic; the old unconditioned rate blended those in and understated everyone's odds roughly two-fold (corps mean ~34% → ~70% when answered). Below the display gate the profile names the sample and withholds the percentage: a thin record's confidence interval is wider than the spread it would be read against. The tooltip beside the shown figure carries the unsmoothed rate.

Show the formulaHide the formula
§2(d) post-Final withdrawal rate (· when answered)
  =  answered, resolved §2(d) Finals approved for publication
     AFTER the Final (the §2(d) came off)
     ÷  answered, resolved §2(d) Finals from this examiner

Answered =  the applicant came back after the Final: a request
            for reconsideration, any later response, a TTAB
            appeal, or a post-Final examiner's amendment
Resolved =  approved or abandoned (pending apps sit out)
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
The walk-aways aren't discarded; they get their own number. The profile shows the share of resolved Finals that get answered at all, because it carries its own signal: across the corps, examiners who rarely withdraw when answered also see fewer Finals answered (the Final itself deters going back). Blending that into the withdrawal rate would double-count the toughness; showing it separately keeps both reads honest. The numerator is also ordering-checked: an approval dated before the Final (a pre-Final win on other grounds) no longer counts as a post-Final withdrawal. A post-Final examiner's amendment counts as an answer because the applicant agreed to a change on the phone; that is a different measurement from §21's amendment rate, which asks how often an examiner reaches for the phone on applications where no substantive refusal was ever raised. Consent-agreement cases are deliberately not split out of this rate: removing them moves the per-examiner figure within noise for the whole corps (the two versions correlate 0.996), because examiners are directed to defer to consents; the one consent fact worth stating is corps-wide, and the Final room states it.

Appeal · the lever

The appeal lever · refusal removed after a notice of appeal

Computed from n ≥ 10 · shown as a rate at n ≥ 25 resolved, smoothed toward the corps mean (K = 40, §4's display standard) · per-path median months at n ≥ 5 · counts shown at any n

After a notice of appeal, the refusal can come off without the case ever needing a Board decision. Corps-wide the refusal came off in about two of every three resolved appeals, and the dominant path is the examiner withdrawing the refusal within a few months, not a Board ruling roughly a year out. The vs-corps verdict renders only at the confidence the sample supports, on §4's graded standard.

Show the formulaHide the formula
Lever rate
  =  (refusal withdrawn after appeal  +  Board/court reversed)
     ÷  resolved appeals (every §15 outcome except pending)

Withdrawal path  =  approval reached after the notice of appeal was
                    filed, with no Board ruling (median months at n ≥ 5)
Reversal   =  Board or court reversed on the merits
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
Sequence, not causation: a request for reconsideration often runs in parallel, so the copy says "removed after the appeal was filed," never "because of the appeal." All grounds (§15's no-per-ground-filter caveat applies). Corps baselines are recomputed nightly from the full TTAB record, on the same definitions as the per-examiner figure they are compared against, so the two cannot drift apart. The figure the profile shows carries the date the record itself runs through, not the date we last measured it.

Appeal

TTAB appeal outcomes

Counts shown at any n · powers the appeal lever (§20) and the receipts table

Most appeals never reach a merits decision; they close because the refusal came off and the application moved forward, or because the applicant walked away (gave up). "Reversed" is the narrow merits win; "examiner won" is merits affirmance only. No-brief dismissals (the appeal was filed but a brief never followed) used to count as examiner wins; since 2026-07-23 they resolve like every other non-merits closure, by what happened to the application (an approval after the notice of appeal reads as the refusal withdrawn, an abandonment as the applicant giving up). "Refusal withdrawn after appeal" records a sequence, not a concession. Across roughly 24,000 appeals that closed this way since 2015, we can see the applicant filing a response or amendment during the appeal window in at least 71% of them; counting every applicant-side docket event, at least 92% show the applicant moving (both are floors: docket-event coverage is incomplete, and a filing we cannot see counts against the "nobody moved" column by default). The bucket includes approvals granted on an applicant's amendment, remands for new evidence, consent agreements filed on appeal, and cases where the cited registration itself died and the refusal went moot (TBMP 1205.01(a), 1209.04, 1212). The appeal record does not say which, so neither do we. This taxonomy is the input behind the Appeal stage: the lever rate (§20), the difficulty score's appeal-resistance axis, and the per-case receipts table all read from it.

Show the formulaHide the formula
Of ex parte appeals filed against this examiner's Final refusals:

  reversed                 Board or court reversed on the merits (examiner lost)
  examiner won             affirmed on the merits
  applicant gave up        appeal closed without a merits ruling,
                           application abandoned
  refusal withdrawn        appeal closed without a merits ruling,
    after appeal           application registered or approved
  pending                  appeal still active

Denominator = all appeals filed against this examiner.
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
Honesty caveat: appeals are matched to the examiner who issued the last Office Action before the appeal was filed, across ALL refusal grounds, not §2(d) alone, because the appeal record carries no per-ground filter. Read these as the examiner's general appeal posture, not a §2(d)-specific one. Detection for the withdrawal bucket keys on registration or a post-appeal approval date, since a first-approval event can predate a later refusal cycle.

Appeal · not surfaced

§2(d)-involved TTAB appeals

Rate gated at n ≥ 10 §2(d) Finals · counts shown at any n

Appeals on applications carrying a §2(d) Final from this examiner, and how often they end in reversal. §15 spans every refusal ground; this isolates the §2(d) record. Computed and documented for transparency, but no longer shown on profiles (2026-07-12), for two reasons: the per-examiner §2(d)-isolated appeal and reversal counts run too thin to read as more than noise, and the rate itself tracks career length and docket appeal exposure (a long-tenured examiner accumulates appeals a newer one cannot have) rather than anything the examiner chooses. The Appeal stage leads with the all-grounds lever (§20) instead.

Show the formulaHide the formula
§2(d) appeal rate
  =  appeals on applications that carried a §2(d) Final from this examiner
     ÷  this examiner's §2(d) Finals (ALL, deliberately unconditioned:
        "how many Finals get appealed" is a population question, and an
        appeal on a still-pending app would leak past a resolved-only base)

§2(d)-involved appeals and reversals are the counts behind that rate.
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
Framing is "§2(d)-involved," not "§2(d)-only": the §2(d) was among the appealed grounds, not necessarily the only one. The join keys on the examiner's detected §2(d) Final, so an appeal is undercounted where that Final office action was never fetched and classified. This supersedes §15's "no per-ground filter" caveat for the §2(d)-isolated numbers specifically.

The playbook

Cited registrations leaderboard

Suppression · ≥5 distinct regs to render

The ten registrations this examiner cites most in §2(d) refusals. Outcomes count per application; each lands in exactly one fate bucket (cleared, contested and lost, walked away, still open), with contested and held as overlays. Whether a specific barrier can be overcome, and how, is the §2(d) detail report (§14). Suppressed below five distinct regs.

Show the formulaHide the formula
The most-cited prior registrations in this examiner's §2(d)
office actions (initial and Final), ranked by distinct citing
office actions: 10 mark groups, with same-mark sibling
registrations collapsed behind each group's disclosure.

Each row splits the DISTINCT APPLICATIONS that faced the citation
by where they ended up, one bucket per application:

  cleared          reached approval
  contested, lost  responded, then went abandoned
  walked away      went abandoned without ever responding
  still open       no terminal outcome yet

Overlaid on those: contested (any response was filed) and held
(a response was met with a maintained or Final refusal whose
follow-on action still carried the §2(d); a follow-on that
classified without the §2(d) means it came off, and does not
count as held. A follow-on whose grounds we have not fetched
stays counted as held: a coverage gap is not evidence the
§2(d) came off).
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
Each row anchors a per-(examiner, reg) case-detail page documenting every §2(d) office action citing that reg. Reverse lookup at /cites/[regNumber] counts every examiner citing a single prior reg and lists the 25 who cite it most.

The playbook

§2(d) detail report · overcome-rate cascade

Per-level gate · n ≥ 25 contested, resolved (§4's display standard: field rates smoothed toward the field's corps rate, K = 40; the vs-corps badge colors only at the confidence the sample supports) · no verdict labels · the rate, its n, and the corps clause are the read

Whether this cited registration can be overcome before this examiner, and how. The share of applications that contested a §2(d) citing that registration and still reached approval. Contested-conditioned (2026-07-23): the same principle as the withdrawal and post-Final rates: an application abandoned without ever responding is an applicant decision that says nothing about whether the barrier gives way, and a held refusal on a still-live case isn't an outcome yet. One reg rarely has enough history against one examiner, so the read is usually the examiner's rate across the application's class field, shown against the corps baseline; a reg-specific rate overlays when it clears the gate on its own.

Show the formulaHide the formula
For an (examiner, cited reg, application field) query, each cited
registration is ranked by overcome rate (· when contested):

  overcome rate  =  applications that CONTESTED a §2(d) citing that
                    reg (≥1 response filed) and reached approval
                    ÷  contested applications at terminal disposition
                       (approved or abandoned)

Out of both sides: walk-away abandons (never responded) and
apps where the refusal was held but the case is still live.

Resolution cascade, per reg:
  reg-level     when that reg clears n ≥ 25 contested corps-wide
                (the rare sharp read: the corps rate leads, the examiner's
                 own rate rides alongside when it too clears n ≥ 10)
  field-level   the ~99% workhorse: the examiner's overcome rate in the
                application's class field, shown vs the corps in that field
  insufficient  neither clears n ≥ 25 → no rate; the field fallback is named
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
A dominant unlock move (a consent agreement, a strategic narrowing) is named only when it is positively detected on at least three contested wins, and only among contested wins (an approval with no response on file has no move to credit). The residual majority of wins reads "by argument or other: no single dominant move," never "argument" as if it were measured. Detected consent and narrowing counts are a floor, and the blindness is structural, not random: moves are detected only where the response met a Final refusal, and wins that cleared without a Final, most §2(d) wins, carry no move evidence at all. So a low move-rate never reads as "this never works"; it mostly means the wins came off before a Final, where nothing records how.

The full record

Terminal outcomes, disposition, pace, and the comparison layer.

Outcome

Clean approval rate

Maturity gate · ≥12 mo on the bench AND ≥30 resolved apps

Of the applications that reached a terminal disposition, the share approved for publication without ever drawing a Final. The win signal that doesn't bundle in approvals dragged through a Final round.

Show the formulaHide the formula
Clean approval rate
  =  apps approved for publication without ever receiving a Final
     ÷  resolved applications (terminal status) on this examiner's docket
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
In-flight applications (no terminal status yet) are excluded from both numerator and denominator. Without this gate, examiners with mostly-pending dockets would show artificially low approval rates.

Disposition · cooperative

Examiner's amendment rate

Published at ≥30 eligible intervention apps in the window

When a fixable problem blocks publication, an examiner can write a formal office action, or call and fix it with an examiner's amendment. This is the share of eligible intervened applications resolved the second way. An amendment on its own rarely clears a substantive refusal (a §2(d) is not phoned away), so applications where this examiner raised one sit out of both sides; only 9% of amended applications carry one in the window. A high share is the sign of cooperation: fixable problems get a phone call, not a response cycle.

Show the formulaHide the formula
Examiner's amendment rate  (· when an amendment could work)
  =  eligible apps resolved with an examiner's amendment (last 2 yrs)
     ÷  eligible apps they intervened on
        (formal office action ∪ examiner's amendment)

Eligible = no substantive refusal ground raised on the app
           (and every office action's text on file)
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
The base is the union of both intervention paths, not OA-bearing applications: over half of amended applications never receive a formal office action at all, so an OA-only base would undercount the cooperative resolutions it exists to measure. Applications with an unfetched office action also sit out; unknown grounds can't certify eligibility. Amendments are read from the USPTO event stream; one action can echo across several event codes, so events are deduplicated per application and date before counting, and applications are counted once regardless of how many amendments they drew. Amendment events attribute by the application's current examiner while office actions attribute by issuer; on transferred applications these can disagree, measured at 0.6% of amended applications, small enough to document rather than re-engineer.

Docket state · not scored

Suspension tracking

No per-examiner suspension statistic is published

A suspension parks an application, usually behind an earlier-filed conflicting application, and pauses every examination clock. We track suspension letters, the six-month checks, and the release back to the examiner, and surface the state on your docket. How often a docket suspends reflects the applications on it, not the examiner deciding them, so no per-examiner suspension rate is published.

Show the formulaHide the formula
Suspension state (per application, not per examiner)
  letter  →  [6-month checks]  →  released to examiner
  captured from the USPTO event stream; admin-review
  suspensions tracked separately from examiner practice
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
Timing figures on this site describe unsuspended prosecution: suspended applications that later publish take a median of roughly 665 days from filing against 189 for never-suspended applications (USPTO-wide, recent two-year publication cohort), with a median of about nine months spent suspended. They are 4.4% of recent publications, so the published medians barely move, but a suspended application should read its docket state, not a median. Completed suspensions run a median of about nine months; when one lifts and the case resolves, 45% proceed to approval with no further office action, and the rest see more prosecution first (246,044 resolved post-suspension cases, through August 2026).

Outcome · context

Publication rate

Maturity gate · ≥12 mo on the bench AND ≥30 resolved apps

Share of resolved applications approved for publication, across all bases. Shown as a context cell in the profile's fine print; clean approval(§7) stays the headline win signal, because publication rate alone can't tell a smooth ride from a three-round prosecution that got there anyway. Read against §7, this rate's own contribution is exactly that difference: the share of approvals earned through a Final rather than before one.

Show the formulaHide the formula
Publication rate
  =  applications approved for publication
     ÷  resolved applications (terminal status) on the docket

Pace

Response turnaround, time-to-publication & the first-OA clock

Sample-size gate · n ≥ 10

Median days from attorney response to the examiner's next action; median days from the first Office Action to publication approval; and median days from filing to this examiner's first Office Action: the day-one client question (“the examiner has the file; when will we hear?”). The clock headlines the last two years: USPTO first-action pendency peaked in 2021 through 2023, so a career median overstates today's queue for examiners whose docket spans that era; the full-record median rides alongside, labeled. Read all three as throughput, not examiner speed: time-to-publication folds in the attorney's own response time, and filing→first-OA is dominated by USPTO queue latency. That's why the clock carries no vs-corps verdict color anywhere it renders.

Show the formulaHide the formula
Turnaround           =  median days from attorney response
                            to the examiner's next action

Time to publication  =  median days from the application's
                            first Office Action to approval

Filing → first OA    =  median days from the application's
                            filing date to this examiner's
                            first Office Action
                            (headline = last 2 years; the
                            full-record median rides alongside)

(Time-to-pub and filing→first-OA are restricted to apps where
 this examiner issued the round-1 OA; mid-stream pickups
 don't count. Filing→first-OA counts real examinations only:
 non-final/final actions, never NOA milestones or the inert
 backlog clear-out notices excluded corps-wide. The recent
 window is dated by the FIRST ACTION, not the filing; a
 filing-date window would drop still-waiting applications
 and understate the median.)
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
Turnaround counts one clock per response round: TEAS often records the same paper twice (a received event and an entered event, days apart), and we start the clock at the earliest (the date the response was received), never once per docket entry.

Time-to-publication and filing→first-OA are restricted to applications this examiner owned from round 1 (i.e., they issued the application's first OA). A mid-stream pickup (where another examiner did most of prosecution and this examiner issued only the late-stage OA) would otherwise produce misleadingly small medians. Time-to-publication therefore describes the OA-bearing side of the docket only: nearly half of approved applications never drew an office action at all (their earliest docket row is the allowance itself), and those fastest approvals are outside this clock by construction. The first-OA clock additionally skips the mass backlog clear-out notices (§ 1's docket-noise filter): those fire years after filing and would otherwise dominate the median for the two affected examiners. The recent window publishes at ≥10 first actions issued in the last two years; an examiner working only later-round cases now falls back to the labeled full-record figure.

Refusal · by class

Refusal rate by class · the class × ground heatmap

Rate cells ≥25 examined and ≥10 fetched · ground shares ≥10 classified refusals · corps baseline needs ≥20 examiners

The same substantive-refusal rate as §1, computed separately for each Nice class the examiner has examined, beside the share of that class's refusals citing each ground. Shading always encodes the gap to the corps in that same class: classes differ enormously in how often they draw a refusal at all, so shading the absolute number would mostly redraw the docket's composition instead of the examiner's behavior. Every cell prints its own number, so the table reads without relying on color.

The two column families are shaded differently on purpose. The refusal rate is a severity reading: above the corps means more refusals, plainly worse for the applicant, so it runs green below the corps and red above. A ground share is a composition reading: leaning on §2(e) more than the typical examiner is a different fingerprint, not a worse one. Those columns therefore use a single neutral hue whose depth marks distance from typical, with a caret for direction: the shading says “unusual here,” and declines to say “bad here.”

Show the formulaHide the formula
Per-class refusal rate
  =  (apps with a substantive refusal ÷ apps with fetched text)
     ×  (apps with a real office action ÷ examined apps);
     all four counts scoped to apps listing that class

Examined apps (per class)
  =  real-office-action apps + first-action allowances
     + attributed no-paper approvals, in that class

Ground share (per class)
  =  apps citing that ground ÷ ground-classified refused
     apps in the class (independent, overlapping)

Ground columns: §2(d) · §2(e) · Other. The §2(e) column
is one per-app bucket: descriptiveness §2(e)(1),
geographic §2(e)(2)–(3) and surname §2(e)(4) together;
an app citing several of them counts once.

Cell shading (both columns)
  =  examiner − the CORPS, in the SAME class
     · refusal rate  → green below / red above (severity)
     · ground shares → one neutral hue, depth = distance
                       from typical, caret = direction
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
A multi-class application counts in every class it lists (about a fifth of applications), so the per-class examined counts deliberately sum to more than the headline base; these are lenses on one docket, not a partition of it. The corps figure in each class is the unweighted mean of per-examiner rates there (§23), so a class is compared against the typical examiner working it, not the busiest. Classes where too few examiners publish carry their own number with no comparison rather than a baseline built on a handful of dockets.

Docket · curated

Specialist tags · curated, two-gate

Curated · no tag ships from the statistics alone

A gold chip beside an examiner's name means their docket is not a typical draw. Each tag clears two gates. The statistical gate finds the concentration; a manual read of the office actions names it. The statistic alone can't: the same 50% "other substantive" share hides a cannabis desk on one examiner and a failure-to-function desk on another (Research No. 04 documents the sweep). The chip's hover panel carries the verified receipt: the counts, the denominators, and the corps baseline. A quarterly job re-runs each tag's receipt query and flags any tag whose gate stops passing for review. Tags are never added or removed by a computation. The blue Madrid variant describes docket composition under §66(a), a procedural fact about what the examiner receives.

Show the formulaHide the formula
Specialist · {Domain}
  =  a statistical gate on the docket (one of four axes)
     AND  a manual read of the examiner's actual office actions
  Ground mix      · other-substantive share > 30% on n ≥ 500, and the
                    named ground family leads in ≥ 40% of ≥ 25 read OAs
  Repeat barrier  · one registration cited against ≥ 10% of ≥ 300 cited
                    applications, ≥ 25 distinct applicant-owners
                    (corps median top-registration share: 0.8%)
  Term capture    · ≥ 30% of the corps's term-named applications since
                    2014, supply ≥ 100, ≥ 25 owners, ≥ 5 filing years
  Madrid docket   · ≥ 40% §66(a) share of the last 24 months' filings,
                    sustained across periods (corps share: 5.2%)
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
Concentration is measured; assignment mechanics are not. USPTO does not publish routing rules, so a tag describes the docket on public record and never claims an official designation. Examiners whose read samples split across two ground families below the 40% bar carry no tag.

The comparison layer

Corps baselines · how every “vs corps” figure is built

Documented honesty entry · no gate of its own

Every “vs corps” clause on a profile compares against an unweighted mean across active examiners with a publishable value for that stat: one examiner, one vote, regardless of docket size. This deliberately answers “how does this examiner compare to the typical examiner?” rather than “what happens to the typical application?”: a volume-weighted average would let a handful of mega-docket examiners define normal.

Show the formulaHide the formula
Corps baseline (rates)
  =  unweighted mean of per-examiner PUBLISHED values;
     each stat's pool is the examiners passing THAT
       stat's own gate, so pools differ stat to stat

Corps timing figures
  =  mean of per-examiner MEDIANS (each examiner's median
     is computed first; the corps figure averages those)

Appeal-lever corps figure
  =  POOLED across all appeals corps-wide (not a mean of
     examiners); sparse per-examiner appeal counts would
     make a mean-of-examiners noise-dominated
Edge cases & limitsHide edge cases
Three honesty notes. Because each stat keeps its own publish gate, different baselines summarize slightly different examiner pools; a baseline pair on one panel may rest on pools that differ by a few dozen examiners. Corps timing figures are means of per-examiner medians, not one pooled median; labels say “typical examiner's median” for this reason. And the appeal-lever corps figure is pooled across all appeals (per-examiner appeal counts are too sparse to average), so it weights busy appeal dockets more, the one deliberate exception to one-examiner-one-vote.

Known gaps

What we cannot yet see, stated plainly. Read these three before you trust any number here.

§66(a) Madrid Protocol coverage gap

About 25% of the §66(a) Madrid Protocol office actions we fetch carry a classification, against about 39% of domestic actions: §66(a) actions reach our classified corpus less often. Where a §66(a) action is classified, our v10 cite extractor pulls citations at least as well as it does on domestic filings. When an examiner's docket is more than 10% §66(a) filings (strict greater-than), the profile's cited-registration section and the per-registration case-detail pages carry a coverage notice; treat the cited-registration counts on those examiners as a lower bound.

Pre-2007 cutoff

USPTO didn't standardise disposition codes until early 2007. We exclude all OAs before that date; including them would inflate "no-disposition" counts and distort every rate. All published metrics on this site are computed against post-2007 data only.

Insufficient data treatment

Below per-metric thresholds we name the sample and withhold the rate rather than print a percentage. A gated §2(d) band reads "Building: n answered §2(d) Finals so far," with the gate stated beneath it. Two floors are locked: 30 applications on record before any overall stat publishes, and 10 answered, resolved Finals before a §2(d) differentiator is computed at all. A computed rate is not automatically a shown one: the post-Final §2(d) withdrawal figure (§4) displays from 25, because between 10 and 25 its confidence interval is wider than the spread it would be read against. We will not show a percentage based on n=8.

Built on the public USPTO record. Coverage begins January 2007, when the USPTO standardized outcome recording.

Data current as of · the most recent stats recompute across the corps

2,223,696 substantive office actions · 925 active examiners · coverage from January 2007

Questions about a specific metric? support@crystalmark.app. We answer methodology questions in plain English.