In a previous blog article I bemoaned the unacceptable flakiness in the function of the USPTO’s Central Fax Number. In this blog article I bemoan the unacceptable sluggishness of the USPTO’s workflow for handling of inbound faxes.
In the old days, in our firm’s experience, a document sent to the Central Fax Number would pretty consistently show up in IFW within two business days. It was rare for this to take more than two business days. We observed that sometimes it would show up on the next business day. Some human being would look at the fax and figure out which file it belongs in, and would post it to IFW, and would tag it with a document description. (This would cause an automatic message to get sent to the appropriate department within the USPTO to look at the document.)
I believe that in the old days, this workflow was contracted out to Reed Publishing. So it was a clerk on the payroll of Reed that carried out these steps.
On September 29, 2024, as described in the previous blog article, we sent ten faxes to the USPTO.
You might wonder “why was OPLF sending faxes? why didn’t OPLF use Patent Center to send in whatever it was?” The answer is, we had ten cases transferred in from other US patent counsel, and we needed to file Powers of Attorney at the USPTO in those cases, and each case was filed recently enough that it was not yet visible in Patent Center. So we were not able to use Patent Center to file the POAs (because we were unable to find out the Confirmation Numbers).
Our relationship with the client in these cases is through an intermediary, namely patent counsel in a country outside of the US. My sense is that the transition away from previous US counsel was less than cordial. This helps to explain why we do not have confirmation numbers available to us.
We sent ten faxes, one for each patent application.
And today’s date is September 4 and the USPTO has not yet acted upon any of the ten Powers of Attorney.
We sent the ten faxes on Sunday, September 29. You might think maybe the USPTO person would have acted upon the faxes on the next business day, Monday, September 30. Nope.
You might think maybe the USPTO person would have acted upon the faxes on the second business day, Tuesday, October 1. Nope.
You might think maybe the USPTO person would have acted upon the faxes on the third business day, Wednesday, October 2. Nope.
You might think maybe the USPTO person would have acted upon the faxes on the fourth business day, Thursday, October 3. Nope.
Today is the eighth business day, and still nobody at the USPTO has acted upon the Powers of Attorney.
I called up the (misnamed) Application Assistance Unit at 571-272-4000. The representative who answered said that it was no surprise to her that the USPTO has failed to act upon the Powers of Attorney. She cheerfully explained that I would have to wait “4-5 weeks” for the USPTO to act upon the Powers of Attorney.
We also filed a number of Powers of Attorney by postal service. The USPS tells us that the USPTO received those Powers of Attorney on October 2, 2024. I asked the cheerful AAU representative about these Powers of Attorney. The representative turned up her cheerfulness setting to 11, explaining that recently the backlog of languishing postal mail is “6-8 weeks”. She said it would be a big surprise if these Powers of Attorney were to get looked at any sooner than November of 2024.
For many years, I understand that the USPTO had outsourced the handling of inbound faxes and postal mail to Reed Publishing. Reed is the government contractor that for many years had handled the extremely lucrative work of typesetting and printing of issued US patents and the typesetting and printing of US trademark registrations. But the USPTO fired Reed from these two services a couple of years ago. The USPTO then mishandled its efforts to bring those functions in-house (blog article).
I imagine that the USPTO’s firing of Reed soured everything about every outsourced service handled by Reed, including handling inbound faxes to the Central Fax Number and including handling inbound postal mail.
This is ridiculous! How does USPTO expect anyone to have any confidence in “America’s Innovation Agency”?
I have had to fax in SB/39s (for inventors’ self-filed Provs) – years ago it took a week to be acted on. Now? even after faxing and re-faxing time and again, nothing happens, even after several weeks. Client then had to pay US counsel to “properly upload” and, lo and behold, it was acted on within a week or so.
So much for inventors saving money on self-filing Provs – the aggravation and follow-up cost a year later is not worth it (which I keep repeating to clients).
Having said that, it’s a disgrace how they (don’t) act. US Tax Dollars at work …