Two USPTO people need to be retrained, and I don’t know their names. I don’t even know how to reach the supervisor of either of those USPTO people. In the old days, I would just drop an email to Kevin Little and he would straighten out this kind of problem. But he is gone and I don’t know who the new person is who does the job that he used to do.
I am hoping this blog article might reach an appropriate person at the USPTO, who could get in touch with me and could help with getting the two USPTO people retrained. And, the place in our application file where one of the people made a mistake, maybe this person could get the mistake corrected in our application file.
Here is the background and here are the details.
As we all know, any given patent application file in Patent Center can have as many as three distinct Customer Numbers (CNs). There can be a Power of Attorney Customer Number (which I call PACN). There can be a Correspondence Address Customer Number (which I call CACN). And there can be a Fee Address Customer Number (which I call FACN). There is no requirement that all three numbers be identical. The very design of PAIR, and now Patent Center, provides for the use of three different customer numbers across these three fields.
How we use CACNs. In our firm’s practice, we serve a number of foreign patent firms that have a role as instructing counsel to our firm. For each foreign patent firm, we maintain a particular CACN. The CACN is set up so that OCNs (outgoing correspondence notifications from the USPTO) get emailed to our firm and to the foreign patent firm. This way the instructing counsel will hear about outgoing correspondence instantly. If our firm were to be slow in reporting the correspondence to instructing counsel, they would nonetheless have heard about it directly from the USPTO. We serve maybe a dozen foreign patent firms, and we have a dozen CACNs, one matching each of the foreign patent firms.
How we use PACNs. In our firm’s practice, we use the same PACN across all of our active patent applications. This means that if for example we need to add or delete a practitioner from the power of attorney, we only need to do it once, in a single place. We update one Customer Number (the PACN) to reflect the added or deleted practitioner, and these two or three mouse clicks cover every application in our portfolio.
As you can see, it is very natural that any active file in our portfolio will have non-identical CACN and PACN. The PACN defines who the practitioners are on the file, which is the same for every file. The CACN defines where the USPTO sends the OCNs for a file, and this is different from one file to the next depending on who the instructing counsel is for that file.
How we use FACNs. In our firm’s practice, we tend not to pay much attention to FACNs. We are lucky that for most of our granted patents, the client or instructing counsel takes responsibility for maintenance fees.
There’s one more thing in our firm’s practice that I should tell you about. When we file a Power of Attorney, we really really really want to know that somebody at the USPTO really did look at the Power of Attorney and decided it was a document that controls the situation. We always want a standalone document (form N570) that makes very clear that somebody at the USPTO really did look at the Power of Attorney and decided it was a document that controls the situation. Or we want some other set of events in the paper record that makes clear that somebody at the USPTO really did look at the Power of Attorney and decided it was a document that controls the situation. So when we are filing any new US patent application, we prepare the ADS in a way that smokes this out. In the “Representative Information” section of the ADS, we never insert a PACN into that field. What we do is merely list one patent practitioner in that section. This way, if we later receive a Filing Receipt that says the Power of Attorney is “the practitioners associated with Customer Number X” then this proves that somebody at the USPTO really did look at the Power of Attorney and decided it was a document that controls the situation. If, on the other hand, the Filing Receipt says merely the one patent practitioner has POA, then this is a tell. This reveals that nobody at the USPTO really did look at the Power of Attorney. We can then ask for a corrected filing receipt and this forces somebody at the USPTO to now for the first time actually look at the Power of Attorney and decide it is a document that controls the situation.
In an average of about 10% of our patent applications, the “tell” works. The Application Branch clerk fails to look at the Power of Attorney, and we smoke it out, and we get the corrected filing receipt, and this makes a clear record that we really do have a controlling Power of Attorney on file.
The subject of this blog article is a particular US patent application that we filed with an ADS. In the ADS, we listed a particular Customer Number in the Correspondence Address field. This was, of course, the CACN that is specific to the foreign instructing counsel on this particular file. And, of course, in the ADS we carefully avoided listing a particular Customer Number in the Representative Information field. We listed only one practitioner.
And we filed a Power of Attorney (PTO/AIA/82B). You can see it here. As you will see, the entire “correspondence address” section of the form is lined through. This makes clear that the Power of Attorney should not lead to any change in the CACN.
When the Application Branch acted upon the Power of Attorney, the clerk did insert our PACN into the PACN field in Patent Center. Which was a correct thing to do.
But the clerk tampered with the CACN field in Patent Center. The clerk wrongly inserted our PACN into the CACN field in Patent Center.
This mistake by the Application Branch clerk harms our client, because it cuts off any of the OCNs getting communicated to instructing counsel. As of now, as for the automatic email notifications from the USPTO that would have tipped off to our instructing counsel that there is outgoing correspondence, it won’t happen.
So what needs to happen is, the person who now does the job formerly done by Kevin Little needs to retrain and correct the Application Branch clerk who wrongly tampered with our CACN.
Now we turn to the second USPTO person who needs to be retrained and corrected. We sent an email to “helpaau@uspto.gov” asking that this CACN tampering be undone in this application. And what we heard back from a nameless AAU person is:
The office will not allow you to have 2 different customer number for 1 application. (correspondence/patent practitioners) The corresponding customer number must be consistent for correspondence and patent practitioners.
What needs to happen is, the supervisor of this AAU person needs to retrain and correct this AAU person. Othewise this AAU person is going to say this same false thing to other applicants in the future.
So here is my hope. I am hoping this blog article might reach an appropriate person at the USPTO, who could get in touch with me and could help with getting the two USPTO people retrained. And, the place in our application file where one of the people made a mistake, maybe this person could get the mistake corrected in our application file (get the CACN restored to what its value was before the tampering by the Application Branch clerk). If that appropriate person could drop me an email at carl2 at oppedahl dot com, please, I would be very grateful. I can then provide the application number and whatever that person needs to get things straightened out.