USPTO mail room works unacceptably slowly

The mail room at the USPTO is, politely stated, a striking example of a service failure. 

In September of 2024, I needed to get Powers of Attorney recognized for several dozen patent files that are being transferred in to our firm from previous US counsel.  I had perhaps three options for ways to deliver the Powers of Attorney to the USPTO:

• • e-file them in Patent Center
  • fax them to the Central Fax Number
  • send them via USPS

The problem with e-filing is that this requires a couple of dozen or more mouse clicks per patent file.  Click around half a dozen times to obtain the Confirmation Number from Patent Center for one of the application numbers on my list of patent files.  Click around half a dozen times to create a single PDF file with the Power of Attorney for the specific application number.  Make sure to change the file name extension from PDF to “pdf”.  Click around a half dozen times to create a submission project in Patent Center, click around to locate the specific PDF file, upload the file to Patent Center, click around some more to submit it.

I did e-file the POAs for a selected handful of my transferred-in cases that were the most urgent in terms of getting the POA recognized urgently.  Each of those POAs did get recognized within a week or so.

One problem with faxing is that the part of the Patent Office that handles faxes is woefully backlogged.  It ended up taking the Patent Office about six weeks to act upon the faxes that I faxed in by posting the documents to IFW.

A second problem with faxing is that this also requires multiple hand-processing steps to send each fax, one per patent file.

I did fax-file another dozen or so of my transferred-in cases that were also urgent in terms of getting the POA recognized urgently.  There was the delay of about six weeks for the Patent Office to post each POA to the file, and then a delay of a few days for each POA to get recognized.

For the remaining hundred or so patent files in this tranche of transferred-in cases, I mailed the POAs to the Patent Office.  The USPS delivered the POAs to the Patent Office on October 2, 2024 (see proof of delivery here).    In the weeks that followed, I placed numerous telephone calls to the (misnamed) Application Assistance Unit and to the EBC, asking when the POAs would get posted to IFW.  I was told over and over again that the mail room is very backlogged.

Yesterday, December 18, 2024, the mail room posted these POAs to IFW.  Yes, it took eleven weeks for the USPTO mail room to open an envelope and attend to the contents of the envelope.

My view is that eleven weeks is a serious service failure at the USPTO.

My experience with service failures at the USPTO mail room is not unique.  There have been many recent postings to the Patent Practice Listserv in which patent practitioners have reported similar service failures.  One practitioner reported having hand-delivered to the USPTO a physical certified copy of a foreign priority document.  The practitioner needs the USPTO to act in a timely way on this physical priority document to accomplish a timely perfection of a priority claim.  The practitioner reports that by now more than two months have passed and even now, the USPTO has failed to post the document to IFW.

I imagine that it is a single department within the USPTO that handles inbound faxes, inbound postal mail, and hand-delivered documents.  That document is clearly woefully understaffed.  The USPTO needs to provide acceptable staffing of that department so that inbound documents will not languish for months, waiting to be processed.