The 67-page study looks closely at how major corporations and research-oriented universities organize and make decisions about the payment and management of filing and annuity fees for their patent portfolios. The study helps its readers to answer questions such as: How much are patent holders paying in filing and annuity fees? What percentage of their patents do they abandon? If they stop paying annuity fees when do they generally do so? How do they make these decisions? How do they organize the logistics of filing and annuity fee payments? What kind of software, web-based applications or consultancies do they use? How much manpower do they expend in keeping up with filing and annuity fees? What percentage of their patents are provisional? What percentage of filing and annuity fee payments are made in a “grace period?”
Just a few of the study’s many findings are that:
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About 63% of the filing and annuity fee payments in 2014 for the organizations in the sample were made to the US patent & Trademark Office
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The organizations in the sample spent a mean of 220 staff man-labor hours in tracking and paying filing and annuity fees in the past year.
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Private companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenues spent a mean $1,396,098.00 on patent filing and annuity fees in 2014.
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A mean of 14.1% and a median of 10% of patents that are abandoned are eliminated at the 3.5 year payment threshold for U.S. patents.
Data is presented separately for large corporations (more than $1 billion in annual revenues), smaller companies (less than $1 billion) and for higher education institutions. Data is also broken out by size of patent portfolio, number of patents awarded and other criteria: