Jan 2020

The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) announced that it entered into an agreement with the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI) to launch a new work-sharing arrangement designed to, among other things, significantly reduce the review time of a Mexican patent application for patentees who already possess a counterpart U.S. patent.  As part of the agreement, the USPTO and IMPI will set up a parallel patent grant framework through which IMPI will have access to, and be able to use, the USPTO search and examination results from the U.S. counterpart.  This new arrangement builds on the pilot project for the Patent Prosecution Highway that the two offices collaborated on in 2011.