Notice of Non-Compliant Response in a Patent Application

Pro se inventors – inventors trying to write a patent application on their own – should discourage themselves from attempting to write and file without help. I say this not for my own job security, but for the good of the inventor. There are many obvious, and many more unobvious, ways to make a mistake in a patent application, an inventor going on his or her own cannot possibly avoid some of them. Even experienced patent attorneys sometimes commit them.

The Supreme Court quoted its own Topliff v. Topliff, 145 U.S. 156 in Sperry v. Florida, when it said that drafting the specification and claims of a patent application “constitute one of the most difficult legal instruments to draw with accuracy.” To that end, writing a patent application requires considerable attention, care, predictive abilities, creative thinking, and hard work. There are so many substantive areas in which a mistake can be made. Beyond that, however, there are even more technical opportunities for a mistake.

I received a notice of non-compliant response recently. This is a notice I received for the first time, and for a very minor oversight. In this case, the notice just pointed out a very small, non-prejudicial, technical error in a response, but one which had to be resolved before the Examiner would consider the response. When a patent application is initially submitted, it presents a list of claims at the end. The claims are numbered, and the numbering helps the Patent Office identify and track claims as they change. Each time you submit a response that amends the claims, the claims must designate their status as original, previously presented, currently amended, new, etc. Failure to designate the status in an amendment will trigger a non-compliant response notice. Fairly easy to get over, but the correction has to be made by a deadline or it will cause the application to be abandon. This is a small mistake I’ll likely never make it again – we made it because we were repeating the original claims and pointing out to the Examiner that she had inappropriately cut and pasted a rejection from an old case with different claims. However, for a pro se application, this could cause a lot of stress and possibly lead to the abandonment of the application if not handled correctly.

I should note that a notice of non-compliant response can be issued for a variety of reasons, not just the one described above. This article is meant to illustrate but one example of such a notice and not to be advice on how to handle any notice. If you receive a notice like this, I strongly recommend you contact a competent patent attorney in your area that you can meet face to face.