In the February installment of its Patent Quality Chats, the USPTO presented statistics on AIA First Inventor to File (FITF) applications. FITF applications are those applications that (1) were filed after March 15, 2013, without claiming priority to an application filed before March 16, 2013; or (2) is a “transition application.” A transition application is an application that claims priority to an application filed before March 16, 2013, but at some point contained a claim that has an effective filing date after March 15, 2013. As expected, the number of pending FITF applications has increased each year since March 16, 2013. However, the USPTO reports that First to Invent (FTI) applications still represent over half of the applications pending through November of the USPTO’s 2016 fiscal year.
