A LOOP Around the Sun and on Patent Quality

One year ago today, I was honored to take my Constitutional oath of Office as Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and the 60th Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

On this anniversary, I am delighted today to refresh, relaunch and refocus America's Innovation Agency's Director's Blog.

In contrast to this page being dormant my first year, the Office has roared. We've been listening, thinking, exploring, building, testing, and learning. Now it's time to reopen this forum to engage more directly: what we're doing, why we're doing it, what we're seeing, and what comes next.

And there's no better place to restart that I can think of than with LOOP. What's LOOP? Well, since we are now headlong into football season, think of LOOP as studying game film, and putting our take-aways back on the field. LOOP also is sort-of a first-year story in miniature. It began as a colloquy during my Senate Judiciary confirmation hearing about linking 'back-end' review processes to 'front-end' examination.

Once issued, our work has contact with the commercial marketplace. What it tells us is extremely valuable.

If a later challenge surfaces prior art, a search strategy, or an issue that would have been useful during examination, we want to understand whether it could have been seen earlier, but in any event equip ourselves to see it during the next relevant engagement.

A year later, I am delighted to report that we've built that feedback mechanism and it's been one of the most excited quality advancements we've achieved - the Learning from Outcomes to Optimize Patents (LOOP) program.

In the LOOP…

Following our announcement last year bifurcating discretionary decisions and merits decisions, I announced a return to first principles and that discretionary decisions would be made in the USPTO Director's Office as expressly authorized in the America Invents Act statute. As part of the bifurcated process, we identified apparent errors that occurred during the examination of some challenged patents.

Ensuring U.S. patents are "born strong" remains our primary objective. Thus, when doubts are raised as to whether claims were properly tested during examination, we should, and will, take a second look. Under the discretionary considerations process, I have routinely referred post-grant proceedings to a merits review and determination whether to institute trial when a petitioner has identified an apparent examination error.

But that shouldn't be the end of the story - and it no longer is. After reviewing several hundred discretionary considerations briefs, we gathered a substantial amount of data on best practices and areas for improvement, and that data has driven meaningful changes to improve examination quality. Armed with this, we then built a superhighway of information being returned to the examination process to adapt - a feedback LOOP.

The USPTO launched LOOP earlier this year with one goal: to leverage the experiences and expertise of PTAB judges and PTAB proceedings to improve patent examination quality. LOOP has brought together Patents and the PTAB to transform post-grant insights from real proceedings into actionable examiner training that has driven patent quality higher.

LOOP, however, isn't just another training program. It's a fundamental shift in how we think about quality as a continuous learning cycle, where every outcome teaches us something valuable about how to examine better tomorrow than we did today. A shift to improve our system, holistically, for our stakeholders.

Creating Born Strong Patents

The vision behind LOOP is simple yet powerful: learn from what happens after patents issue and use those lessons to strengthen examination practices. Our patent examiners are among the finest scientific and technical minds anywhere - the best in the world at what they do. In every examination, they serve, in a very real sense, as chief negotiators on behalf of the United States - determining where the prior art leaves off and the applicant's inventive contribution begins.

That work requires judgment. It requires the right tools. And it requires the richest information we can reasonably place at the examiner's fingertips. Examiners lead. Tools, information, and experience support.

When our examiners are then afforded an understanding of the real-world challenges patents face in post-grant proceedings, they gain valuable quality insights that strengthen their understanding of:

• Conducting a more comprehensive, targeted prior art search
• Building a clearer, more defensible examination record
• Writing a reason for allowance that explains the particular rationale for issuing a patent
• Avoiding common mistakes before a patent ever issues

LOOP is furthering the Office's goal to ensure patents that are born strong and born to last. This benefits all our stakeholders and improves the entire innovation ecosystem.

Extraordinary Engagement and Impact

The total effort we call LOOP has been nothing short of inspiring:

• A detailed review of approximately 150 post-grant proceedings has been conducted to derive learning moments
• Approximately 4,200 hours of live training has been devoted to delivering high-quality LOOP programming
• 86% of participants have reported that the content helps them in their daily work
• An average of 657 USPTO professionals attended each training session
• 738 USPTO professionals attended LOOP's comprehensive Summary and Review, which discussed all the most critical learning moments and was open to all Patents professionals
• 86 examiners, 73 SPEs, and 21 signing officials have received individualized feedback
• LOOP has resulted in 154 hours of direct coaching and mentoring
• Approximately 5,000 quality enhancement hours have been dedicated to the USPTO's longstanding commitment to its quality framework and delivering high-quality examination and training for the continuing education of our workforce

These numbers tell me that our people are committed to improving quality and want to understand how their work connects to the bigger picture.

Particularly noteworthy is the 3,375 hours we invested in training our front-line supervisors, the quality gatekeepers who guide and mentor examination teams every single day. When we strengthen their knowledge, the impact multiplies across the organization.

Loop Content, on LOOP

Our six-month training series covered practices that matter most:

• Understanding post-grant proceedings and their implications for examination
• Locating and learning from related proceedings to ensure consistency
• Building clear records and writing effective reasons for allowance
• Converting AIA and appeals outcomes into examination best practices
• Learning from petitioners' arguments about search errors to strengthen search strategies
• Synthesizing it all in a Summary and Review for the entire Patents workforce

We have collected all six of the training videos and created a video library so that any patent examiner can review and re-review the materials whenever needed. This helps our team stay current on best practices while continuing to meet our pendency goals.

External Stakeholders as Partners in Quality

One of LOOP's most innovative aspects is how it has transformed external feedback into internal improvement. Our external stakeholders file discretionary denial requests and oppositions. This means petitioners and patent owners are actively contributing to USPTO quality improvement through the issues they raise and the arguments they make. That's a feedback loop that benefits everyone.

Looking Ahead: Building on Success

The enormous success of LOOP has us thinking big and opens exciting new opportunities:

• We just announced our 2026 Pre-Appeal and Appeal Pilot Program, which will place PTAB judges as conferees on appeal and pre-appeal conferences in Technology Center (TC) 1700. This will provide 300 hours of PTAB expertise to sharpen examiner's Answers through real-time feedback. If successful (and I believe it will be), we'll expand this across additional TCs.
• The next LOOP cycle will feature subject matter deep dives and interactive workshops -where PTAB judges and patent examiners can openly collaborate.

We will keep studying outcomes. We will keep improving our tools. And we will keep moving useful information to where it can be put to work at its earliest.

One year in, that may be the result I am proudest of: the Office now has a way to get smarter every time the patent system teaches us something. As I told America's Innovation Agency in my very first speech on my very first day a year ago - I want to hear from you: Tell. Me. What. You. Think!

That makes LOOP the right effort to bring this blog back - and back to the future! Our forum is open again, and I will use it to keep sharing what we are learning, where we are headed, and to keep us all in the LOOP!

Yours in Innovation,

Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and
Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office