**1. Introduction**

The granting of industrial property (IP) assets should be based on two central and interrelated principles: quality and efficiency. An efficient system to ensure

protection of IP rights is basically bound to the time taken to execute the granting procedures, but also to the clarity and organization of the analysis performed during the technical examination. On its turn, quality is usually bound to the standardization and improvement of administrative proceedings, providing reliability and legal certainty in decisions.

As to the granting procedures and time for granting industrial property rights, the Brazilian National Institute of Industrial Property – INPI-BR has been using its efforts to significantly reduce and adjust the granting time taken by the Institute to the average of major international offices. Among its actions, we note the implementation of the so-called "backlog combat plan" announced still in 2019, which is already in effect and expected to be in place until 2021 [1]. It is also worth highlighting the results and efforts regarding the time taken by the Institute to register trademarks, leading to the inclusion of INPI-BR among the signatories of the Madrid Protocol [2].

Over the last decades, INPI-BR has been incorporating to its Strategic Plan several initiatives related to the quality of its applications/registrations. The Strategic Plan 2018-2021 [3] provided for partnerships, cooperation agreements with international offices, improvement of prioritized examination programs, implementation and review of patent examination guidelines, among other activities. As to the technical cooperation initiatives, we note a recent strategic partnership between INPI-BR and the European Patent Office – EPO that includes training, discussion of best practices, sharing of tools, and exchange of patent databases [4].

It is important to highlight that there are studies [5–7] showing that changes in the workload of examiners can affect the quality of the examination process and its results, suggesting that a factor with high potential of causing instability in the applications/registrations and discrepancies in the decisions of a patent office is the unbalanced workload of patent examiners, i.e., an uneven distribution of patent applications among them. Additionally, it is also relevant to highlight that a specific study [8] using automatically data related to INPI-BR applications showed that the volume of patent applications can be used as a measure of examiner's workload, and suggests that claim's pages is probably a key workload indicator. Such facts become even more relevant since INPI-BR currently does not apply a well defined application distribution method, and the decision/responsibility for distribution is on behalf of the team leaders, who are somewhat free to apply their own criteria.

Thus, due to the importance of the subject for INPI-BR itself, specifically for the Patent Directorate of the Brazilian National Institute of Industrial Property – DIRPA, and to the scarcity of studies on methods for analyzing and distributing patent applications to the examiners, aiming at balancing the workload in an optimized manner, the development of a method in this regard would be a great contribution to the efficiency and quality of patent examination, being an important element to fulfill the mission of international Intellectual Property offices in general.
