Law Department Management Blog
According to the American Intellectual Property Law Association’s Rep. of the Ec. Survey 2005, at 17, corporate IP department attorneys (not including heads of departments) spent one-third of their time on IP prosecution work directly (See my post of Sept. 28, 2010: new-age patent lawyers should move beyond prosecution work.). They spent about one-fifth of their time on “opinions, counseling on inter partes conflicts or prospective conflicts prior to litigation or formal ADR.”
What particularly pleased me, a numbers guy, is the finding that “On average, the number of new US and PCT Patent applications prepared and filed by corporate IP department attorneys in 2004 was 22.9.” Now there is a benchmark for prosecution productivity!