A new website offers a useful — and free — tool to help patent applicants and their attorneys make data-driven decisions about patent prosecution strategy. The Examiner Ninja website publishes allowance rates, interview effectiveness data, and appeal records for USPTO Patent Examiners in a searchable form. This data can be very useful for applicants and their attorneys who are trying to decide whether an interview, amendment, or appeal may be the best open when responding to a particular Examiner's rejection.

The data for individual Examiners currently spans an Examiner's entire USPTO career, while art unit and overall statistics cover the last 15 years. The website plans to roll out additional search and filtering capabilities in the near future.

The website is offered by Justin Roettger, a web developer and attorney in California who gathers the information from several public websites and makes it available in an easy-to-use format.

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