Improving Office Action Analysis Accuracy

ClaimMaster generally does a reasonably accurate job with detection of the cited prior art in the Office Action rejections, in particular when the relied-upon references are patent publications listed using standard notation (e.g., "US7,891,892", "EP1000000", etc.)  However, when the Office Action relies upon citations to non-patent literature, such as journal/technical articles or other similar items, the formatting used by the USPTO examiners varies greatly and sometimes ClaimMaster may not detect such NPL listings in the rejection.  The use of incorrect inventor names for the cited patents in the OA also interferes with the accuracy of prior art detection. Moreover, OCRed PDF Office Actions often contain various artifacts and incorrect text, which further complicates correct detection of prior art references in the rejections.  We therefore recommend that you try to use ClaimMaster analysis tool with Office Actions in native DOCX format, if they are available from Patent Center.  In addition, the following steps may also help with improving accuracy of prior art detection: 


 1)  Make edits in the OA document directly and then click on "Re-analyze OA document" button to see if that improves the analysis.  


 For example, you can place the cited NPLs in quotes or parentheses, such as 

      • Claims 1-5 are rejected under pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 103(a) as being unpatentable over ASTM ("Standard Consumer Safety Specification for Toy Safety")  or
      • Claims 1-5 are rejected under pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 103(a) as being unpatentable over ASTM (Standard Consumer Safety Specification for Toy Safety) or
      • Claims 1-5 are rejected under pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 103(a) as being unpatentable over "Standard Consumer Safety Specification for Toy Safety"


You can also try making other minor adjustments to the language of the rejection section, such as removing spaces or other non-numeric characters in the listings of publication #s, and then click on "Re-analyze" button to see if it will process better in the tool.  For example, changing a broken up citations, such as "U. S. Pub. Numbr. # 2011 008 7055 A1" to "US20110087055A1", while usually not necessary, may improve detection in some cases.  


ClaimMaster also verifies inventor names for the detected publications with the USPTO/EPO databases, so if the Office Action refers to incorrect inventor names (e.g., "Johnson" instead of "Johanson", etc.) or uses inconsistent abbreviations for the patent #s it the rejections, this too may lead to incorrect detection and these issues will need to be fixed directly in the Office Action to improve detection accuracy. 


2)  If you are a +Drafting subscriber, you can try using AI to reanalyze the contents of the OA.  Doing this may be a helpful option if ClaimMaster is initially not correctly identifying rejections/objections/allowances in the Office Action due to the citation format used by the Examiner.




3) If there are still issues after using the above options, you can right-click on the tree elements to edit claim listings and also edit/add/remove references and new bases for rejection. This operation will automatically update text summary of the Office Action.