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<p>Yes we saw this just within the past two weeks. We filed two
cases on the same day for the same owner for the exact same
identification of goods. One is a plain-text mark and the other
is a logo in which the most prominent element is, you guessed it,
the identical plain-text mark.</p>
<p>And they got put onto the desk of two non-identical Examining
Attorneys. In two non-identical Law Offices.<br>
</p>
<p>And within the past two weeks each Examining Attorney mailed out
a first Office Action.</p>
<p>If you were to put the two Office Actions side by side and work
your way through them, you would be astonished. I'll not go into
details. The sole identical element of the two Office Actions is
that in neither case did a search of prior filings lead to any 2d
refusal. But there are instances of a refusal (on other non-2d
grounds) in one case that did not get raised in the other. And <i>vice
versa</i>. Barring some surprise, to secure approvals for pub
there will be no choice but to accede to non-identical IDs in the
two cases, for example. If we were in class 25 (clothing) which
we are not, it would have been a case of one of the EAs getting
all wound up about what to do with the feather boas and the other
EA getting all wound up about what to do with the smoking jackets,
and arriving at non-identical proposals about new ID wording.<br>
</p>
<p>I would have thought that legacy practice (doing a cluster
analysis on the corpus of not-yet-examined cases and assigning the
cluster to a single Examining Attorney) had some common sense to
it. It could promote consistency among examined cases. It could
save internal resources within the Law Offices given that two
related cases might not suck up twice as much time to examine as
two unrelated cases.</p>
<p>But no, if you were to look at the two applications I am alluding
to here (same filing date, same applicant, same goods, same text
in the two drawings) then your reaction might well me that the
USPTO's way of picking Examining Attorneys for the two
applications could not be stupider even if one had set a goal of
trying to be as stupid as possible. Stupid in terms of
consistency of examination, stupid in terms of managing the
resources and productivity of the Law Offices.</p>
<p>Now let's assume for sake of discussion that there actually is
some non-stupid reason why these cases got assigned to EAs the way
they did. I have to strain to come up with a guess as to a good
reason, but maybe the big day arrived when some USPTO algorithm
decided it was time to assign these cases to EAs. And the
algorithm happened to look at case A1 first, and and picked EA1 to
assign it to. And then ten minutes later the algorithm got around
to looking at case A2. And during the intervening ten minutes,
two minor earthquakes within the USPTO had happened by coincidence
within two minutes of each other. A first minor earthquake was,
EA1 got a notice that he or she was soon to be put on temporary
detail in the Madrid Processing Unit. And two minutes later, a
second minor earthquake was that newly hired EA2 had just gotten
placed into service and had an empty docket that needed to be
filled urgently. This is the kind of fact pattern that one must
construct and imagine to make it non-stupid to assign the cases
like this.</p>
<p>But even if you then stick your neck out and imagine that there
have been dozens and dozens of earthquake coincidences that would
explain dozens of such failure-to-cluster events, this still
leaves more stupid to be explained.</p>
<p>Even if the two applications I am alluding to here (same filing
date, same applicant, same goods, same text in the two drawings)
somehow had a non-stupid reason for being assigned to
non-identical EAs in non-identical Law Offices ... <br>
</p>
<p>why the heck would the USPTO not even bother to tell the two EAs
that they have been assigned related cases? Why did the USPTO
pass up the opportunity to drop an email to each of the EAs
letting them know that some other EA has a closely related case?
And then each EA could look in the computer and see stuff that
might be helpful. In my two cases, the Office Actions arrived a
week apart. The slower EA, when sitting down to examine the case,
could have looked in the computer to see the contents of the
Office Action that had already been mailed out by the faster EA.</p>
<p>Or even if we imagine the USPTO passing up the opportunity to
drop an email to each of the EAs ... isn't there part of the
ordinary examination process that ought to have prompted the
slower EA to go look at the other nearly-identical case anyway?
Even in the absence of any prompting by some cluster analysis? So
for example when the time came for the slower EA to do a search of
Office records, surely the other nearly-identical case would have
jumped off the computer screen into the face of that slower EA.
And then the slower EA could at least get tipped off in the faster
EA had identified some issue common to the two cases -- a surname
issue or name-and-likeness-of-living-individual issue, or feather
boa issue or smoking jacket issue. But no, if you look at the two
Office Actions, your strong reaction would be that it must be that
neither of the EAs did anything at all to pay attention to the
work of the other of the EAs.<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2/6/2025 12:04 AM, Jaclyn Ionin via
E-trademarks wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAPvU6Zw4a=-LMXRY6G34YGr-2yiM2B7ki8+t-gfbn8yPKcsLpg@mail.gmail.com">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>
<div class="gmail_default">Has the practice of all
applications by a single applicant being pulled at once by
examiners been discontinued? </div>
<div class="gmail_default"><br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_default">I have several sets of applications
not only owned by the same owners and filed simultaneously,
but some of which are also straight translations of each
other, yet they are being pulled for examination at
different times by different examiners. </div>
<div class="gmail_default"><br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_default">Anyone else encountered this
recently?</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
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