USPTO Announces Location of DFW Satellite Office

The USPTO has announced that downtown Dallas will serve as the site for its Dallas-Fort Worth regional satellite office.  The office is expected to be a place where small businesses and entrepreneurs can learn how to navigate the patent process, meet with examiners, and access USPTO’s comprehensive search databases.  It will also serve as a patent examination office for technology developed in the region and throughout the South. 

The office is expected to provide an economic boost of over $400 million dollars to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. The creation of satellite offices is significant in that it marks the first time in the USPTO’s 200-year history its operations have expanded outside Washington D.C.  With new regional offices and several hundred additional examiners, the USPTO hopes to reduce the time it takes an inventor to get a patent approved, currently averaging three years, as well as address the backlog of roughly 620,000 pending patents.