The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is publishing “accelerated examination” procedures designed to enable patent applicants to obtain a final decision on whether their application for a patent will be granted or denied within 12 months of filing.
Applicants will be required to provide specific information so that review of the application can be completed rapidly and accurately.
See the following link for more details:
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/sol/notices/71fr36323.pdf
I have successfully filed for accelerated examination in the past.
US 7,020,925 to Gitelis is a patent for a mechanical toothbrush that was filed on December 22 2004 and issued on April 6 2006. The decision to grant actually came through in less than a year.
US 6,755,051 to Rachel Israel (Delta Galilee Industries) describes a method of manufacturing underwear. Accelerated examination took 18 months. We reported all relevant prior art and petitioned to make special. The application issued without office actions.
It is not clear that fast tracking actually saved any time however. Like going into the express checkout line in the supermarket, it depends how many customers are waiting ahead in the queue.
Well written and carefully claimed mechanical patents tend to go through examination fairly smoothly anyway, and the patent issuing in 18 months is not unusual.
I am skeptical that the new procedures will prove themselves with business methods, telecommunications, chemistry or biotechnology where claims tend to be wider. Time will tell.
In some arts (like mine), time to first action is a year. The best thing that the applicant can do to speed up prosecution is to accurately define the invention in the claims and for them to be grammatically correct. Also a tiny few cases get misclassified in the wrong art unit and bounce around the office until someone claims it (sometimes for years). Somehow giving the classifier a hint of where the app is to go (such as citing similar applications in the IDS) is a way to make sure that doesn’t happen.