Month: January 2024

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Can the attorney skip next Tuesday’s webinar about DOCX risks? Is it okay if the attorney sends a paralegal?

I received an email message today from a paralegal who is signed up for next Tuesday’s webinar entitled “Reducing malpractice risk with $400 non-DOCX penalty that will start on January 17, 2024”.  The paralegal writes:

I am really looking forward to this webinar. I recruited fellow patent paralegals to view the webinar with me (in the same location). ☺

Despite efforts to convince attorneys to attend, there may be some who might not attend.  Will there be a small segment in the webinar where you will provide quality control tips for patent paralegals – who in real life are the ones ultimately responsible for looking after their attorneys?

This paralegal’s email inspired the blog article that you are reading now, in which I try to answer more questions, such as:

Can the attorney skip next Tuesday’s webinar about DOCX risks?

Is it okay if the attorney sends a paralegal?

Here is what I wrote, trying to answer this paralegal’s question.  Continue reading “Can the attorney skip next Tuesday’s webinar about DOCX risks? Is it okay if the attorney sends a paralegal?”

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Webinar: Two-factor authentication for those who use ISA/EP

Do you use ISA/EP?  Do you use an EPO mailbox to receive ISR/WOs from ISA/EP?  Do you use an EPO smart card to log in at the mailbox?  Then you need to migrate from a smart card to a time-based one-time password form of two-factor authentication.  And you need to do it before the end of 2024.  One way to learn how to do this is by attending an EPO webinar that will take place soon.  Continue reading “Webinar: Two-factor authentication for those who use ISA/EP”

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When did the ¼-inch quick-release hex shank begin? Who thought of the ¼-inch quick-release hex shank?

(Update:  thanks to a comment below from alert reader Bernie Greenspan, I eventually located ANSI standard B107.4 which standardized the ¼-inch quick-release hex shank in 1982.)

Many people who try to do projects and repairs around the house or around the office would, I think, report that they experienced two events involving power tools that changed things a lot.   One’s life divides into “how it was before I got an oscillating tool and how it was after” and “how it was before I got an impact driver and how it was after”.  As will be discussed below, the impact driver uses driver bits and drill bits having a “¼-inch quick-release hex shank”.  The main point of this blog article is to raise two seemingly unanswerable questions:

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Two Patent Center service failures in the past 24 hours

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Patent Center has had two service failures in the past 24 hours. The USPTO had promised its users that this would not happen — there are supposedly two servers called “Blue” and “Green”, and if one of them crashes the other is supposed to come into service automatically. The user should not even notice the switchover from one server to the other, we were promised. Despite these promises, there was a first Patent Center service failure yesterday afternoon, and a second Patent Center service failure this morning.  Continue reading “Two Patent Center service failures in the past 24 hours”