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Examiner Nicholas E Kolderman

TECH CENTER 3700 · 2 ART UNITS · 137 DECIDED APPLICATIONS · LAST ACTION JUN 2019
ALLOWANCE RATE = SHARE OF DECIDED APPLICATIONS (ALLOWED + ABANDONED); PENDING EXCLUDED
OVERALL ALLOWANCE RATE · POOLED ACROSS 2 ART UNITS
64%vs 59% weighted peer average+5 pts

Examiner Nicholas E Kolderman has allowed 88 of 137 decided applications in Mechanical Engineering, Manufacturing, Products.

88 allowed
49 abandoned
No applications pending.
The weighted peer average (59%) is each art unit's average below, weighted by this examiner's applications in it (2 art units).
DATA UPDATED AUGUST 27, 2026
AU 3736 · 60%AU 3791 · 76%
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Outcomes over timemonths since first office action

grantedpendingabandoned
granted 61%abandoned 33%0%50%100%048mo36momonths since first office action
↳ move your cursor across the chart to read any month

Within 36 months of the first office action, 61.19% of Examiner Nicholas E Kolderman's applications had been granted and 32.84% had been abandoned. This counts each application from its own first office action, so it covers a different population than the overall allowance rate above, which is measured across decided applications only.

Office actions per allowanceexaminer ● vs weighted peer average ○

Mailed office actions per allowed application
1.91
2.09

Counts mailed office actions on the merits — non-final and final — over this examiner's 88 allowed applications. A first-action allowance counts as zero, and a notice of allowance is not an office action.

The weighted peer average (1.91) blends the per-art-unit averages, weighted by this examiner's allowed applications in each: 3736 (1.81), 3791 (2.12). Each art-unit figure is the unweighted mean of the individual examiner values in that art unit — the peer-typical figure, not the art unit's own ratio.

What the data says.reading this examiner

Examiner Nicholas E Kolderman has an overall allowance rate of 64% across hundreds of decided (allowed plus abandoned) applications, spanning 2 art units in Technology Center 3700 (Mechanical Engineering, Manufacturing, Products). Across these art units the allowance rate ranges from 60% to 76%. These are pooled figures from the public USPTO record, not predictions about any specific application.

Reading a pooled record.

This page pools Examiner Nicholas E Kolderman's record across 2 art units into one overall allowance rate — total allowed divided by total decided (allowed plus abandoned) applications, with pending excluded. Aggregate figures describe the past public record and are not predictions about any specific application. This is general information about the data, not legal advice.

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 →

Appeals, stage by stagepre-appeal conference, then the Board

STAGE 1 · CONFERENCEno pre-appeal requestsn = 0counts only
0 of 0 proceed
+ 3 never asked
STAGE 2 · APPEAL123APPEALSn = 3counts only
STAGE 1 · CONFERENCE OUTCOME · n = 0
    STAGE 2 · APPEAL OUTCOME · n = 3
    1. Abandoned2—
    2. Affirmed in part1—

    Appeal outcomes are counted from USPTO transaction records. Where an examiner has few appeals on record, these figures describe what happened in those cases and should not be read as a rate.

    Rates are not shown below 20 cases, because a single case would move the figure by more than five percentage points.

    Categories report what happened to the appeal, not the application's final fate — most appeals resolve without a Board decision, and an application whose rejection the Board affirmed can still be granted afterward.

    HOW TO READ THESE NUMBERS

    Past outcomes, not predictions — identity, attribution, and coverage limits on every figure on this page. Expand for the full list.

    These figures describe outcomes already on the public record. They do not predict the outcome of any application and are not legal advice.

    Reassigned applications. The USPTO publishes only the examiner currently assigned to an application. Where an application has changed examiners, its entire history — including office actions issued by a predecessor — is attributed here to the current examiner.

    Examiner identity. The USPTO publishes no stable examiner identifier. Identity on this site is derived from the examiner's published name together with the art unit. An examiner's record is pooled across the art units they worked in within a technology center. An examiner who has worked in more than one technology center appears here more than once, with their record split between those pages. Two examiners who share a name within a single art unit may be combined into one record.

    Comparing across technology centers. Rejection-ground rates (§101, §102, §103, §112) track the subject matter a technology center examines, not examiner severity. Technology Center 3700's rates are comparable with other art units inside TC 3700 and are not comparable with rates from a different technology center.

    Comparing examiners. An examiner's rates are shown here against the average for their art unit, which is the closest available comparison because art units group related subject matter. Comparisons get less reliable the further you move from that — between art units, and especially between technology centers, differences in subject matter, applicant population, and prior art make raw rate comparisons misleading. Where an examiner has few applications on record, small changes in the underlying data move the percentages a great deal.

    Applications not counted. An application whose currently assigned examiner has moved to a USPTO business unit outside the examining technology centers is absent from this record, together with every office action on it — even where those actions issued while the application sat in an art unit shown here.

    Coverage is incomplete. This site does not include every patent application. Applications that may not appear here include those examined in technology centers not listed on this site; those that moved elsewhere within the Office, such as to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board on appeal, to central reexamination, to the Office of Petitions, or to design or plant examination; those never published, including applications filed with a nonpublication request and those abandoned before publication; provisional applications, which are not examined on the merits; anything filed or acted on after the refresh date above; and individual applications or office actions that the USPTO's public services did not return when we retrieved them. That list is illustrative, not exhaustive.

    Counts may be low. The individual outcomes described here are matters of public record. The counts and rates computed from them are ours, and they are incomplete. Because of those gaps a count here may be lower than the true figure. We cannot state the size of the difference, and it is not uniform — one examiner's page may be close to complete while another's is materially short. Rates are computed from these same counts, so the uncertainty sits in both the numerator and the denominator. Do not treat a figure here as a count of record; verify against Patent Center, PatentsView, or the Patent Examination Data System before relying on it.

    An absent figure. Where a figure is absent, we did not retrieve the underlying records. It does not mean the value is zero, and it does not mean the USPTO holds no such records.

    Rejection-ground retrieval. Office-action rejection records are retrieved from the USPTO's office-action dataset in date-bounded batches sized so that each is returned whole in a single response. Retrieved this way, repeated pulls return the same set of records — the retrieval is reproducible. That is a property of our retrieval, not a guarantee that the USPTO dataset itself is complete; the coverage caveats above apply to these figures as to every other.

    Compiled from USPTO records as published on August 27, 2026. Prosecution continues after that date and is not reflected here.

    The record, art unit by art unit.2 art units

    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.

    ◈ PRIMARY · ART UNIT 3736
    100 APPS · 60% ALLOWANCE

    Allowance ratewhere this examiner sits among peers

    60%
    higher than about 45% of the 71 examiners with published rates in art unit 3736
    AU avg 61%
    0%
    100%
    Each short mark is one of the 71 examiners with published rates in art unit 3736; the dot is this examiner. The tick is the art-unit average.

    Disposition100 decided applications

    60 allowed
    40 abandoned
    No applications pending.

    Pendencymonths from filing

    filed
    first action 20.7mo
    disposed 37mo
    0
    48mo
    Art-unit average: first action 20.8 mo, disposed 35.4 mo.

    Rejection groundsexaminer ● vs art-unit average ○

    REJECTION RATE = SHARE OF THIS EXAMINER'S APPLICATIONS THAT DREW ≥1 OFFICE-ACTION REJECTION IN WHICH THE GROUND APPEARS

    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; where an art unit has no computed average for a ground, that row says so rather than showing a comparison.

    §101 — Subject-matter eligibility
    19%
    47%
    §102 — Anticipation (novelty)
    78%
    73%
    §103 — Obviousness
    82%
    94%
    §112 — Written description & definiteness
    76%
    90%

    Interview benefit

    Allowance rate for applications with an examiner interview versus without one.

    without
    49%
    +37 pts
    with
    86%

    A correlation, not proof that interviews cause allowances. Based on 29 decided applications with an interview and 71 without.

    ◈ ART UNIT 3791
    37 APPS · 76% ALLOWANCE · LIMITED DATA

    Allowance ratewhere this examiner sits among peers

    76%
    higher than about 79% of the 125 examiners with published rates in art unit 3791
    AU avg 54%
    0%
    100%
    Each short mark is one of the 125 examiners with published rates in art unit 3791; the dot is this examiner. The tick is the art-unit average, computed across all 127 examiners in the unit — a broader group than the 125 published marks, so it can sit apart from them.

    Disposition37 decided applications

    28 allowed
    9 abandoned
    No applications pending.

    Pendencymonths from filing

    filed
    first action 25.3mo
    disposed 44.2mo
    0
    48mo
    Art-unit average: first action 27.4 mo, disposed 42.1 mo.

    Rejection groundsexaminer ● vs art-unit average ○

    REJECTION RATE = SHARE OF THIS EXAMINER'S APPLICATIONS THAT DREW ≥1 OFFICE-ACTION REJECTION IN WHICH THE GROUND APPEARS

    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; where an art unit has no computed average for a ground, that row says so rather than showing a comparison.

    §101 — Subject-matter eligibility
    40%
    46%
    §102 — Anticipation (novelty)
    81%
    66%
    §103 — Obviousness
    87%
    97%
    §112 — Written description & definiteness
    87%
    97%

    Based on 37 applications — too small a sample to characterize the rejection mix reliably; shown for completeness.

    // FAQ

    Questions about Examiner Nicholas E Kolderman

    • What is Examiner Nicholas E Kolderman's overall allowance rate?
      64% across hundreds of decided (allowed plus abandoned) applications in public USPTO data, pooled over 2 art units.
    • How many art units does Examiner Nicholas E Kolderman examine in?
      2 art units within Technology Center 3700, based on the public record.
    • Does Examiner Nicholas E Kolderman's allowance rate vary by art unit?
      Across the examiner's substantial art units the allowance rate ranges from 60% to 76% in public USPTO data.
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    METHODOLOGY & DISCLOSURES

    Methodology. This page pools every art unit in which Examiner Nicholas E Kolderman has a public record within Technology Center 3700. Statistics are computed from publicly available USPTO records, refreshed on a recurring schedule. This page's data was last updated August 27, 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: 137 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.

    Office actions per allowance. Mailed office actions on the merits — non-final and final — averaged over this examiner's allowed applications. A first-action allowance counts as zero and is included; a notice of allowance is not an office action. The comparison figure is built the same way as the allowance-rate benchmark — from each art unit's own average for this measure — weighted here by this examiner's allowed applications in each art unit, since that is this measure's own denominator. Each art unit's figure is the unweighted mean of its examiners' individual values, so it is the peer-typical figure rather than the art unit's own ratio.

    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. Consult a registered patent practitioner about your own matter. These figures are reproduced and recombined by Lynch LLP from the USPTO's Patent File Wrapper bulk archive and Open Data Portal APIs; they are not an official USPTO publication, and the USPTO has not reviewed, endorsed, or verified them. If a page here is wrong, tell us at lynchllp.com/contact and we will correct or remove it. Full disclaimers →

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