Category: Industrial Designs

With each day that passes, more uncertainty is injected into the work-from-home situation at the USPTO.  Now it seems the Office of Personnel Management is offering early retirement (memo dated January 28, 2025) for those who wish to avoid having to return to the office.    Continue reading “USPTO employees offered “buyouts” to retire early to avoid having to return to the office”

Recall my blog post of a couple of days ago on Trump’s “Return to in-person work” order.  Now the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) have issued “further guidance” to agencies on their ending of work-from-home.  It is dated January 27, 2025 and you can see it here.  Continue reading “Further guidance from OPM and OMB to agencies about ending work-from-home”

(The brief answer is, most employees of the USPTO who work from home will not need to do anything differently in the near term, and instead will have to await “separate guidance.”)

On his first day at work, one of the executive orders signed by Trump was an order (see it here) aiming to terminate “remote work arrangements”.  The order, dated January 20, 2025, says:

Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of Government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary.  Continue reading “How Trump’s “Return to in-person work” order affects the USPTO”

Hello readers.  It is now 2025 and this means it is time to get in your numbers for the 2024 toteboards:

• • Thirteenth Annual US design patent toteboard
  • Tenth Annual US utility patent toteboard
  • Sixth Annual US plant patent toteboard
  • Tenth Annual US trademark toteboard

The goal is to recognize and rank law firms in the US based upon the numbers of US design patents, US utility patents, US plant patents, and US trademark registrations each firm obtained for clients in 2024.

The questionnaires will close on Friday, February 14, 2025.

Every year after I post the results of the toteboards, I get sad emails from firms that want me to accept their numbers late.  This would, of course, typically result in kicking other firms down in the rankings — other firms that got their numbers in on time.  Please help to reduce the number of such sad emails that I will receive this year.  Maybe you are a person at your firm who is responsible for getting these numbers in.  If so, please get your numbers in!  Otherwise, please forward this blog posting to somebody at your firm to make sure that somebody at your firm gets the numbers in for your firm.

You can see the previous toteboards here, going back to the earliest toteboard in 2012.

The mail room at the USPTO is, politely stated, a striking example of a service failure.  Continue reading “USPTO mail room works unacceptably slowly”

Yes, I realize the subject line doesn’t actually narrow things down very much, in the sense that many USPTO announcements are poorly worded in one way or another.  But this one is breathtaking in the extremity of its poor wording.  See if you can catch it:

Planned maintenance
Customer Interaction Platform Contact Center Transition
The USPTO will transition our contact centers to a new platform beginning at midnight ET on Monday, October 28 and ending at midnight ET on Tuesday, October 29.
Users may experience longer wait times during the transition period.

(emphasis in original.)  Continue reading “poorly worded USPTO announcement”

I am pleased to present the 2023 toteboards:

• • Twelfth annual US Design Patent Toteboard
  • Ninth annual US Trademark Registration Toteboard
  • Ninth annual US Utility Patent Toteboard
  • Fifth annual US Plant Patent Toteboard