What happens after my patent application has been filed?

What happens after my patent application has been filed?

Matt Dixon (Partner) gives expert video advice on: What is the Patent Office?; When are patents granted?; How do I file for a patent application? and more...

Once your patent application has been filed, the Patent Office will examine it. They will have a look and see if it meets the formal requirements of the patent law. So, whether you filled in the forms properly and the documents all meet those requirements. But they will also do some searching to see if the invention is already known. So they will search in their databases and into their records and provide you with an examination report that will tell you whether they think it's new, whether they think it involves an invented statistic, and whether it's industrially applicable. Also, they will say whether it's excluded from patent protection.