Megan discusses the importance of examiner experience in shaping prosecution strategy. Experience level is one of the factors in the calculation of ETA, PatentAdvisor’s proprietary metric that predicts the probability and difficulty of allowance, and it matters for reasons beyond the obvious. In addition to simply being new to the process, early career examiners also carry the burden of a disproportionately large docket. If a new examiner chooses to churn through their docket instead of focusing on a handful of applications, their grant rate will be significantly slower than average.