Do your own patent application customer number changes!

Recently I blogged about three nice new Private PAIR features — USPTO nice again — this time letting you check customer numbers and Now you can update entity size yourself! and Get your own new USPTO customer numbers.  Here is a fourth nice new Private PAIR feature.  You can update the customer number associated with a patent application or patent yourself.Traditionally this process — updating the Correspondence Address customer number or the Fee Address customer number — involved filling out a form and faxing it to the USPTO and then waiting and waiting for USPTO get around to hand-keying the information into its systems.  There was a risk of the USPTO person getting a digit wrong in the hand-keying process.  If you wanted to get a large number of applications or patents updated you could send in a spreadsheet but this was cumbersome and also took a long time for USPTO to act upon.

With this nice new Private PAIR feature, it’s easy to do it yourself, and the changes take effect instantly!  Here’s how it works.

You log in at Private PAIR.  Click on “PAIR Administration” and “Update Application Address”.  You will see a new screen for updating application addresses.  On this screen you paste in the application numbers for which you want to make changes.  Then check boxes as appropriate to tell USPTO to change the CA customer number or the FA customer number, or both.  You can add rows to this screen and it means you could probably do twenty or thirty changes all at once if you need to.

Then click “preview” and then “submit”.  The changes will happen instantly.

One of the nice things about this system is that it permits a second person to check the work of the first person, before clicking “submit”.  The system allows the “previewed” page to be saved so that a second person can log in and check it and submit it.

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