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L'examinateur

A vision for intellectual property examination – 2030

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Russ lives in the village of Allegre, in France, famous for its displays of flowers and located just outside of the cathedral city of Chartres.  Though American, Russ loves living in France with his wife, a pre-school teacher, and their children.  He owns his three bedroom cottage, with a thatched roof and two birds-eye windows, a vegetable garden and situated next to the open sky and broad fields of his farming neighbors.  One of his wife's brothers lives in the town, and is the proprietor of a local restaurant and Café du The.

Russ is well educated.  He studied electrical engineering with a major in Patent Examination in Magill University in Montreal, Canada, and received advanced degrees in electronics at Berkeley in California and at the Sorbonne in Paris.  He is fluent in French and English, and calls himself "passable" in German, though he knows the quality of every German wine on all the menus of Chartres, a half hour away from his house by car.  Russ is much in demand as a professional patent examiner, being certified in English, French and German by the USPTO, the EPO, the JPO and WIPO.  He is constantly being requested as an examiner by applicants, and commands a Class A fee for his services.  It is rare his docket has fewer than 100 applications on it, because of both his strong knowledge of the technology, and his keen ability to isolate the new inventive material in an application, and quickly bring the prosecution to a patent if one is merited.  Russ is often consulted by fellow professional examiners around the world, and is well respected in the professional association of examiners. 

Russ's high salary is well appreciated by the tax assessors of Allegre, who welcomed him and his wife to the community, assuring him sufficient Internet bandwidth to his workroom in his cottage.  Though his bicycle is well known through Allegre and the neighboring villages along his morning exercise circuit, less well known is his generous support of the pre-school in the church where his wife works, or for the Home for the Aged in his Department.  Since Russ's wife Nicole and the children spend the day at the school, Russ often has his midday meal at his brother-in-law's village restaurant, sharing a table and gossip with the local workers, and returning to his own work at the cottage thereafter.

The life of a professional examiner in Allegre is a good one.  Since there are ten EPO/USPTO/JPO qualified examiners in the region, the Trilateral has built a conference center in Chartres, not far from the famous cathedral.  With advanced electronic collaboration facilities, and a few meeting rooms, the conference center provides a convenient location for electronic or personal interviews with applicants, visiting office managers and fellow examiners. Continuing training is also provided there.  Its location, not far from the best French restaurant in Chartres, Le Gargoyle, has not hurt its popularity as a center for the intellectual property community in that region of France, and indeed a strangely disproportionate number of  USPTO managers traveling to WIPO in Geneva find their way to that center for a conference with the local examiners, usually just before dinner time. 

Today Russ is working on an especially difficult application, for (please keep this confidential) an electronic microcircuit device, to be embedded subcutaneously in the wrist below a tattoo of a watch, that will make the hands of the tattoo rotate and show the correct time.  Dependent claims have biological limitations, design limitations, trademark and copyright elements as well as advanced GPS circuitry.  Russ has already held one interview with the applicant's attorney, electronically from New York, and late this afternoon will be consulting with some fellow examiners in Omaha, Nebraska and Geneva, Switzerland.  With all the advances that technology has wrought, he still has to contend with the time zones across the world, so his afternoon will be morning in the United States.  He will also collaborate with a U.S. biotech examiner and the U. S. copyright and trademark examiners who have been assigned to this application by his docket manager.  That will make it a very busy afternoon, as the case is an American one for the USPTO, and the communications must take place after 3:00 PM.  But on the positive side, Russ will enjoy a glorious morning cycling across the French countryside, and a relaxing lunch.