Failing to tell the OED your new address

From time to time in the EFS-Web listserv, list members have commented on the need for a registered practitioner to keep the Office of Enrollment and Discipline informed of the practitioners’s mailing address changes.  I now have first-hand knowledge of the enormous fraction of registered practitioners who do indeed fail to keep the OED up to date.

What led to all of this is that I will be teaching a PCT Seminar in Redwood City, California on October 16-18, 2018 and of course I would like to fill the room with attendees.  And how better to fill the room with attendees than to mail out post cards to the people in Silicon Valley who are admitted to practice before the USPTO?

Readers will recall my blog article about smart ways to accomplish the mailing of post cards.  That’s what led to this.

So anyway, what happens is that some of the post cards get returned to sender because they are undeliverable.  The photograph shows the 150 or so cards that have been returned so far, from a mailing that I did a couple of weeks ago.  This is from a mailing of about one thousand post cards.  Yes, amazingly, about 15% of all of the registered practitioners in Silicon Valley have mailing addresses with OED that are so far out of date that the postal service simply returns the mail to the sender.

If you are a registered practitioner, you might want to check the listing in the OED database and see if you need to update your address.

In particular, if you are a registered practitioner and if you are in Silicon Valley, consider that if you do not receive a post card advertising this PCT seminar, it might mean that your address with OED is out of date.  There are about 4200 registered practitioners in Silicon Valley.  (Half of these practitioners should have received a post card by now, and the other half should receive a post card within the next seven days.)