For a long time now the number of patent applications filed in Australia has been increasing. For example, between 2009 and 2018 the total number of standard patent applications rose by over 25%, to nearly 30,000. This growth has been driven by foreign applicants, with the number of applications filed by domestic applicants being, at best, steady. There has, however, been a clear downward trend in provisional applications – which are predominantly filed by Australians, and represent the most common first-step into the patent system – where numbers have fallen by 22% over the same period.Not all of these patent applications – and especially provisional and innovation patent applications – are filed using the services of patent attorneys. For example, many inexperienced and impecunious Australian individuals and small businesses attempt to prepare and file their own applications, while some overseas applicants arrange their own filings, but are nonetheless required to provide an ‘address-for-service’ in Australia, which need not be a patent attorney.
It is therefore not immediately apparent from the overall filing numbers what impact these changes are having on the businesses of Australian patent attorneys. It is even less obvious whether there are any trends within the profession in relation to which firms are most affected by such changes. Conveniently, however, I have developed some data matching and analysis tools that enable me to identify filings according to whether or not they were handled by a registered Australian patent attorney or firm – as opposed to some other non-attorney agent – as well as which firms were responsible.
In this article, I will present the results of this analysis, some of which I found quite surprising. For example, I found that while the total number of provisional applications filed may have been in decline, this is almost entirely due to there being fewer self-filers, with attorney-filed applications remaining steady (though not showing any growth). I also found that, over time, there appears to have been a gradual shift by domestic applicants away from larger firms, in favour of smaller firms and individual attorneys. Further, I found that there has been a significant shift in the past few years, by both international and domestic clients, towards firms that remain privately held, at the expense of firms within Australia’s three publicly-listed ownership groups. I know that many private-practice attorneys will tell me that they already knew this, and I have certainly heard stories about client-transfers, however the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’. So now we have some data!
Since commencement of the Raising the Bar patent reforms in 2013 there has been a potentially fatal trap in the Australian rules relating to divisional applications. I have always thought it inevitable that someone would eventually fall into this trap – and practically certain that when it did happen, the applicant would be from the United States. A recent decision of the Australian Patent Office, in which a US-based applicant has been denied the opportunity to convert an application into a divisional of an earlier filing, in order to avoid having one of its own previous applications cited as invalidating 
Today, 13 February 2018, 
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