An interesting Pateltly-o study shows that the number of appeals on examiners' decisions to the BPAI doubled within the past 3 years from less than 3,000 on 2005 to more than 6,000 on 2008. Naturally, the BPAI backlog also grew.

However, the number of complete reversals of the examiners decisions went down from 40% to 20%.

This is a very interesting piece of information. The main question here is whether applicants were appealing more because of the high success rate hence bringing to the BPAI table bad appeals (and thus lowering the success rate) or whether the BPAI merely decided to reverse less (or maybe the USPTO imrpoved examination dramatically as it likes to argue).

For the full Patently-O post, click here: BPAI Appeal Statistics: The Plummeting Reversal Rate