Headquartered within steps of the USPTO with an affiliate office in Tokyo, Oblon is one of the largest law firms in the United States focused exclusively on intellectual property law.
1968
Norman Oblon with Stanley Fisher and Marvin Spivak launched what was to become Oblon, McClelland, Maier & Neustadt, LLP, one of the nation's leading full-service intellectual property law firms.
Outside the US, we service companies based in Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and farther corners of the world. Our culturally aware attorneys speak many languages, including Japanese, French, German, Mandarin, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Farsi, Chinese.
Oblon's professionals provide industry-leading IP legal services to many of the world's most admired innovators and brands.
From the minute you walk through our doors, you'll become a valuable part of a team that fosters a culture of innovation, client service and collegiality.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued final rules implementing the inventor's oath or declaration provisions of the America Invents Act (AIA) on August 14, 2012.
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Ex parte Jones et al (Appeal 2010-011287, Serial no. 11/082,103) turned on obviousness of a claim directed to a method of creating a specialized alloy. There was a gap in the prior art relative to a limitation of applying two different particles to an alloy where one of he particles alters the alloy differently than the other. The Examiner nonetheless rejected the claims based on a theory of art recognition such that the cited art “teaches that many different properties may be altered by adding materials . . .It easily follows then that the same properties might be altered differently . . .”
The Board was not persuaded by the Examiner’s position because “the Examiner has failed to identify support for a finding that one of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to make such a modification. See In re Fritch, 972 F.2d 1260, 1266 (Fed. Cir. 1992) (The “mere fact that the prior art may be modified in the manner suggested by the Examiner does not make the modification obvious unless the prior art suggested the desirability of the modification.”)