More than three and a half years … that’s how long it took the USPTO to get around to acting upon a Power of Attorney that we filed in a patent case. Yes, the application is still pending after all this time. It happens.
We have a patent application in which we filed our Power of Attorney and Rule 3.73 Statement on August 25, 2011. Now on March 20, 2015, more than three and a half years later, comes Form N572. That’s the form in which USPTO tells us that it won’t recognize the Power of Attorney that we filed, with an assertion that
the statement required by 37 CFR 3.73(c) has not been received.
The assertion is false; the USPTO did in fact receive the 3.73 Statement on August 25, 2011. Had the Form N572 been accurate, it would have said something like
we nit-picked your 3.73 Statement and found an imagined nit.
We could, of course, file a Petition asking that the Form N572 be withdrawn and that the Power of Attorney be recognized without further delay. But unfortunately the path of less work is to tinker with the 3.73 Statement to remove the imagined nit (which is not really a defect) and to refile everything. So that’s what we will do.
This case reminds us that although we usually docket to check for USPTO recognizing a newly filed Power of Attorney, in this case we somehow forgot.
How old is your oldest patent Power of Attorney that USPTO has failed to act upon?
Don’t know about POA’s but I had an application pending for 5 or 6 years before the first OA. BTW – you should give a class on the new Data Sheets. Because they are now considered part of the application everything has to match with other paperwork and if anything needs changing you have to amend. This has been a nightmare for many of us.