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<p>Wow. You can send an email to <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:helpaia@uspto.gov">helpaia@uspto.gov</a> and if you do,
it won't get ignored. It will actually get answered. But it will
take five months to get the answer. Here is how it went.</p>
<p>We paid the Issue Fee in one of our cases on March 3, 2025, and
as so often happens these days, it was <i><b>after I paid the
Issue Fee</b></i> that somebody in the Issue Branch got all
wound up about how supposedly our drawings were defective. A Form
M327 arrived on March 7, 2025, telling me that two of my figures
were defective.</p>
<p>Never mind that the Application Branch people whose job it is to
pipe up if something is wrong with the drawings did not find
anything wrong with the drawings back when they were deciding
whether or not to mail out a Filing Receipt (back in August of
2022).</p>
<p>Never mind that the USPTO people who do 18-month publication did
not find anything defective about the drawings and were able to
carry out the 18-month pub.</p>
<p>Never mind that when the Examiner examined the case, the Examiner
was able to figure out whether or not the case was patentable
without the quality of the drawings getting in the way.</p>
<p>But anyway yes once we had paid the Issue Fee, somebody in the
Issue Branch found a real or imagined defect in two or our
figures. And I filed a detailed response (later the same day, on
March 7, 2025) explaining why there was nothing wrong with those
figures. (I suspected it was a problem arising out of the fact
that the USPTO system mangles drawings when placing them into IFW,
because the drawings were perfectly clear in SCORE but were
mangled in IFW.) And many weeks passed with no word back from
anybody at the USPTO as to whether our case was going to go
abandoned (as threatened) due to the supposedly defective
drawings.</p>
<p>This was back in the days when you could pick up the phone and
dial the AAU and it would only take an hour or two to reach a
human being. </p>
<p>Anyway whatever the problem was, I had phoned up the AAU twice
(the second time on April 7, 2025) and the AAU persons had not
meaningfully assisted. And so on April 30, 2025 I sent the
email. </p>
<p>(As an aside, I cannot now recall how I stumbled
upon <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:helpaia@uspto.gov">helpaia@uspto.gov</a> as a place to go to try to get help.)</p>
<p>Anyway, I guess whoever the nameless person was in the Issue
Branch who had gotten wound up about this, that person maybe
eventually paid attention to my detailed response and decided to
release the hold on the to-be-issued case, because the patent did
eventually issue on June 18, 2025.</p>
<p>Anyway, here is the astonishing thing. Today, October 9, 2025 I
received a response to the "helpaia" email. It came from
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:helpaau@uspto.gov">"helpaau@uspto.gov"</a> which is not the same email address, but it
quoted my April 30 email so it is clear it was in response to my
email that I sent to "helpaia".</p>
<p>There are several learning opportunities floating around in this
odd sequence of events.</p>
<p>First, apparently <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:helpaia@uspto.gov">helpaia@uspto.gov</a> is a real thing and does
really reach human beings somehow. I suppose every practitioner
should add this to their bag of tricks in case it might some day
be helpful.</p>
<p>Second, we note that it took more than five months for this email
to elicit a response. </p>
<p>Have you used helpaia? Did it work for you?</p>
<p></p>
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