Recommended Number Of Independent Claims

The patent office recommends that applicants keep their number of independent claims to three or less, and the total number of claims to 20 or less. This is good practice, although I would be even more restrictive, trying to file an application with only a single independent claim. One reason is that multiple independent claims are usually regarded as being directed to multiple inventions. That triggers a restriction requirement, and ends up forcing the applicant to either prosecute multiple applications or abandon some of the claims. Another reason is that examiners are presently overwhelmed with cases. A case with an unreasonably large number of claims can be viewed unfavorably from the start.

The main exception to filing applications with only one or two independent claims is in filing PCT applications. The PCT deals with what they call "disunity" rejections by requiring the applicant to pay an extra fee for each "invention" arising from multiple independent claims. The fee used to be a bargain at only $220 per invention, but recently the PCT increased the fee to about $1,000 per invention. While no longer a bargain, that price is still often a good choice when compared to the cost of prosecuting multiple divisionals. Moreover, when the application goes into national phase, the national phase country or region typically allows the applicant to keep all his claims together.

These suggestions should not be read to imply that only a single inventive subject matter should be disclosed in a given patent application. Quite the contrary. Applications should be filed with several different patentable subject matters if they can reasonably be combined. The applicant or patent attorney can eventually claim all of those different subject matters. It's just more cost-effective to direct the initial set of claims to a single patentable subject matter, and use subsequent divisionals and/or continuations to focus on the other subject matters.