Patent Bar Prep - Day 33 February 14, 2007
Posted by atharkhan in : Patent Bar Prep , add a commentFinally finished Chapter 22. Phew! That…was… incredibly… tedious! At one point, I found myself skimming the question and going directly to the answers. Surprisingly, I wasn’t doing any better/worse than when I do read the question and agonize over it. So, maybe I should do that on the actual exam to figure out what the question is about.
Admittedly, this behavior was mildly “slacker-ish” but I am very glad I did it because it proves that there is some law/logic to the answers and that when in doubt, you can try and use just some basic rules to eliminate answer choices. E.g. if a question is about a design or plant patent and they are asking about when a maintenance fee is due, you can skip reading it and go to “none of the above” because there are no such fees for these types of patents. You don’t need to read (or make a timeline) about the filing and issue dates.
After Reissue/Re-Exam, Chapter 23 (Design/Plant Patents) was almost enjoyable. Almost. It was relatively brief — only 60 questions — of which maybe 10 were extremely easy. So, this one went by smoothly.
Tomorrow, I will start on Interference Practice (Chapter 24). I am hoping to get to 27 by Sunday.
Patent Bar Prep - Day 32 February 12, 2007
Posted by atharkhan in : Patent Bar Prep , add a commentFinished Chapter 21 (Allowance, Issue, Maintenance & Extension). I did pretty well mainly because I am getting slightly better with searching the MPEP.
My approach to searching the available resources has been changing/evolving as I go through these chapters. Initially, I would try and “place” a concept (from memory) within an MPEP chapter, go to that chapter and then perform a text/string search. That proved to work well for topics related to 700 and 2100 but not for other obscure topics that could easily be in one of several places within the MPEP. So, I switched to the CFRs. The CFRs have a few pages in the beginning which can easily work as an Index or Table of Contents. That worked absolutely fantastic for a while. But, then I tried searching the “Index” provided for the MPEP. Although not as logically organized as the CFRs, the benefit of searching the MPEP Index is that it is relatively uncluttered. It only contains key terms and MPEP Rule Numbers. So, if you do a search for a term and find it pointing to various rules within the same chapter (e.g. 21xx), you can then open that chapter and do a text/string search there. As you can see this is a modified version of my initial approach but seems to be fairly efficient. I am able to find most things within a minute or so. Reading/parsing the rule itself is another matter.
Anyway, back to the “Progress Report.” I was slightly disappointed that I got a couple of Patent Term Adjustment questions wrong. These in my opinion are freebies that I should have slam dunked. Basically, I forgot the rule for FDA/Regulatory Delays. So, that’s one thing I will need to review again before the exam.
Chapter 22 is about Correction of Patents. Its one of those long (meaning 150+ Questions) chapters. I only managed to get to number 81 today. Hopefully I will be able to finish this one tomorrow.
Patent Bar Prep - Day 31 February 11, 2007
Posted by atharkhan in : Patent Bar Prep , add a commentFinally finished Chapter 18. It was so annoyingly painful that I would rather have killed myself slowly… twice! It was all about the timelines for petitions, notices of allowance, appeal briefs, shortened statutory periods and their implications.
After that nightmare was finally over, Chapters 19 and 20 were a piece of cake. First, they were relatively shorter — about 70 Questions each. And, second, they were both about inventorship and assignment which are conceptual topics rather than procedural. Thanks to my Property professor, the concepts of “Bona Fide Purchaser for Value” and “Notice” are laser etched into my brain. So, that helped tremendously with 35 USC 261 rules of assignment. Other than that, there were very few rules in this chapter and most were intuitive.
Chapter 21 is another short one with about 35 questions and I really wanted to finish it. It would have been a nice personal record. But, there is only so much of this stuff you can take in a day. So, I hit El Pollo Loco (again!) and went home to play with FolderShare.
By the way, as I was writing this, I had a complely random thought; I wonder who the prolific inventor is in terms of issued patents. Remind me to waste some time on that after I am done with this exam.
