Examiner Don Gordon Zhao has allowed 750 of 850 decided applications.
Don Gordon Zhao's public record in Technology Center 2400 spans 1 art unit. Across hundreds of decided applications, his allowance rate is 88%. This rate reflects the percentage of applications in that decided set—those allowed or abandoned—and does not include pending applications. The allowance rate is a historical statistic of past dispositions and is not a prediction of outcomes in any particular case.
This profile aggregates the examiner's record across all art units in TC 2400 into a single pooled statistic. The allowance rate describes past decisions on applications that have been resolved (allowed or abandoned). Aggregate figures characterize the examiner's historical record and are correlational, not predictive of any individual application's outcome.
These are aggregate statistics from this examiner's past public record — not predictions about any specific application. The per-art-unit figures below show how the record varies across art units. Our approach to patent prosecution →
Each section benchmarks this examiner against that art unit's average. Figures are this examiner's own public record within the art unit; the overall rate above pools them.
Grounds can co-occur, so the four don't sum to 100%. The art-unit figure is the unweighted mean across examiners in the art unit; §102 and §112 carry no art-unit benchmark.
Allowance rate for applications with an examiner interview versus without one.
A correlation, not proof that interviews cause allowances. Based on 411 decided applications with an interview and 439 without.
Lynch LLP represents applicants in patent prosecution before the USPTO. These are general resources about the firm's services — not advice about this examiner or any specific application.
Methodology. This page pools every art unit in which Examiner Don Gordon Zhao has a public record within Technology Center 2400. Statistics are computed from publicly available USPTO records, refreshed on a recurring schedule. This page's data was last updated July 22, 2026. The overall allowance rate is total allowed divided by total decided applications (allowed plus abandoned) across all art units — not an average of the per-art-unit rates; pending applications are excluded. Figures are rounded for display. Pooled sample: 885 applications.
Rejection rates. Each §-rate is the share of this examiner's applications that drew at least one office-action rejection in which that statutory ground appears; applications with no rejection on record are excluded, and because grounds can co-occur the four do not sum to 100%. The art-unit figure beside each is the unweighted mean of the per-examiner rates across the art unit, published for §101 and §103 only. Beside the overall allowance rate we show a benchmark: for a single-art-unit examiner it is exactly that art unit's average, labeled “art-unit average”; for an examiner spanning several art units it is the “weighted peer average” — the per-art-unit averages, weighted by this examiner's application count in each — labeled distinctly because it is a blended figure, not any single art unit's average. Both are built from the same per-art-unit averages the panels show.
Lynch LLP is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Examiner statistics are derived from publicly available USPTO data.
These statistics describe past examiner behavior and do not predict the outcome of any particular application. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes. Where this page compares an examiner's allowance rate to an art-unit average, that comparison is a factual description of the public record, not a characterization of any individual examiner's conduct or competence.
This page is for general informational purposes and is not legal advice. No attorney-client relationship is formed by viewing it. Full disclaimers →
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