Patent listed as expired followed by an expiration date

Question

I have seen several patent applications where the application is listed as expired but below that there is an adjusted expiration date. Can someone please explain what this means? Here is an example:

Application US11/223,705 events 2004-09-15 Priority to US61107004P 2005-09-09 Application filed by Allan Westersten 2005-09-09 Priority to US11/223,705 2008-09-18 Publication of US20080224704A1 2010-04-20 Application granted 2010-04-20 Publication of US7701204B2 2012-07-27 Assigned to DIENCO, INC. 2019-12-12 Application status is Expired - Fee Related 2028-03-15 Adjusted expiration

Answer 1

The short answer is that it is expired for failure to pay a maintenance fee.

The long answer is that Google makes a estimated expiration (their Adjusted expiration) when an application grants to a Patent. This patent grant issued in 2010 (and that's when the Adjusted expiration would have been auto-generated) but then the Applicant did not pay the 7.5 year maintenance fee in 2019. So it became abandoned, and Google updated it as ' Application status is Expired - Fee Related' apparently without removing the Adjusted expiration. In fairness, if the Applicant unintentionally failed to pay the maintenance fee, they can revive the application (with the inevitable fee) according to 37 CFR 1.378 and explained in MPEP 2590

You can check the status of this patent's maintenance fees on the USPTO's website