Prosecution Insights
Prosecution Insights
Technology area: Medical Devices & Mechanical Engineering
1 pending office actions • 1 art units • 1 examiners • 0 of 1 (0%) have an AI response strategy ready • 1 patents granted in the last 365 days
Surmodics, Inc. has 2 pending office actions in the Medical Devices & Mechanical Engineering technology area. These matters are assigned to 2 distinct examiners across 2 distinct art units. JUSTIN L ZAMORY is the busiest examiner for this entity, with 1 busiest examiner pending action. The distribution across 2 distinct art units suggests the portfolio covers varied technical aspects within the medical device field that require different specialized knowledge.
With 2 distinct examiners handling the 2 pending office actions, the company must navigate two different sets of examiner preferences. The fact that JUSTIN L ZAMORY is the busiest examiner with 1 busiest examiner pending action highlights that the workload is distributed across the available examiners. Practitioners should note that the 2 pending office actions are not consolidated, meaning that arguments successful in one of the 2 distinct art units may not necessarily carry weight in the other. This requires a customized approach for each of the 2 pending office actions to address the specific requirements of the assigned examiners.
Difficulty is derived from the rejection statutes on the most recent pending office action. §101-driven and multi-statute cases are graded Hard; §112-only and obviousness-type double-patenting cases are graded Easy; everything else is Medium. "Unknown" means we have not yet parsed a statute for that office action.
| Bucket | Cases |
|---|---|
| §103 only | 1 (100%) |
How the docket's pending cases split across USPTO tech-center bands.
Manual office-action response work runs about 10 hours per case. The time-saved bands below show what IP Author's prosecution pipeline typically delivers — a conservative 20% on the low end, 35% in the middle, 50% on the high end.
| Examiner | Apps on this docket | Allow rate | Interview lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| HOAG, MITCHELL BRAIN | 1 | 70.4% | +18.8% |
Cases in front of an examiner whose interview lift is 10 percentage points or more — i.e. interviewed cases historically resolve more favorably than non-interviewed ones. The top 1 ordered by deadline are shown.
| App # | Title | Examiner | Due in |
|---|---|---|---|
| 17896589 | THROMBECTOMY CAPTURE SYSTEM | HOAG, MITCHELL BRAIN | — |
| Art Unit | Apps |
|---|---|
| 3771 | 1 |
| App # | Title | Examiner | Art Unit | Statutes | Status | Due in | AI | Filed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 17896589 | THROMBECTOMY CAPTURE SYSTEM | HOAG, MITCHELL BRAIN | 3771 | §103 | Non-Final OA | — | Pending | Aug 26, 2022 |
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