[Patentpractice] Assignment Center - can you save progress part way through? No

[pbrisky at fujitsu.com]

With a “100% of users choose Assignment Center” slogan beneath it.

On a side note – I had to correct an assignment recordation in response to a notice of non-recordation.  Ass. Center had inventors on the conveyor screen appearing as I had initially tried to correct them – meaning sans error.  And they were out of order.  At that point, I added the document they said they wanted and went through with submitting the assignment.  The coversheet that was produced had the inventors in the correct order.  Additionally, the pdf download of the coversheet was blank.

I hate this system.  We have a double check in place where I prep the assignment recordation and someone accesses the saved submission, reviews it and submits it.  This does not seem possible with this system.  It is not customer number/sponsor based like patent center is where you can what other people have uploaded.  It does have a couple of nice features but I hate it overall.

Pamela Cei Brisky
Senior Patent Paralegal/Docketing Manager
Fujitsu North America, Inc.
Fujitsu Intellectual Property Center

571-216-2112
pbrisky at fujitsu.com<mailto:pbrisky at fujitsu.com>

From: Patentpractice <patentpractice-bounces at oppedahl-lists.com> On Behalf Of Dan Feigelson via Patentpractice
Sent: Tuesday, February 6, 2024 8:45 AM
To: For patent practitioners. This is not for laypersons to seek legal advice. <patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com>
Cc: Dan Feigelson <djf at iliplaw.com>
Subject: Re: [Patentpractice] Assignment Center - can you save progress part way through? No


So many "improvements" to its IT in such a short time...I think the PTO should put a big "NEW AND IMPROVED" banner across its website, the same way that detergent or breakfast cereal or fertilizer manufacturers do on their products when they make the packages smaller and raise the price per package at the same time.

Dan

On Tue, Feb 6, 2024 at 1:23 PM James Katz via Patentpractice <patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com<mailto:patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com>> wrote:
So we have now found that Assignment Center appears to “silently” automatically save in-process submissions.  We have tested abandoning a submission at various screens, including at the final submission screen and have found that our progress was saved and we could return later to complete the submission.

So in order to implement a second pair of eyes on submissions, our assistants will stop once they reach the submit screen, return to the home screen, go back in to the saved submission and print the completed cover sheet to PDF, they will then email that PDF to the attorney along with a copy of the assignment document that was uploaded.  The attorney will review and respond with approval after which the assistant will go back in and submit.  At least one downside to this approach is that the attorney will be unable to review the actual uploaded assignment document.  So if the wrong document was uploaded, but the right document was attached to the email for review, the attorney will not know.

Another solution we considered but discarded was to create a dedicated MyUSPTO account for assignment submissions to which everyone has access. This would allow one to go in and review a saved submission.  However, not only would this be cumbersome to have to log out of one’s personal MyUSPTO account and into another (and maintain two 2FA entries, etc.), it was also unclear if multiple users could be logged in to the same account at once. I also did not check if this would violate some PTO TOS somewhere.

Another thing we have found is that when entering multiple email addresses to receive submission confirmations, etc., each recipient will receive an email addressed only to them. So from that email you cannot tell who the other recipients are.  Furthermore, the email itself, e.g., the subject line and body, do not identify the application number or client/matter.  Only the id number assigned to the submission by Assignment Center is identified.  You have to open up the attached cover sheet document to see the application number.

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