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

[Watt, Rachel S.]

I emailed them Monday - no response - no surprise.

From: Patentpractice <patentpractice-bounces at oppedahl-lists.com> On Behalf Of Orvis via Patentpractice
Sent: Wednesday, February 7, 2024 3:00 PM
To: For patent practitioners. This is not for laypersons to seek legal advice. <patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com>
Cc: Orvis <orvispc at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Patentpractice] Assignment Center - can you save progress part way through? No


External Email - Use Caution

________________________________
Has anyone received a response to the help email for the assignment centers? I'm about to send them my daily email asking for a response.

I try not to call the PTO. If I do, most times I'm upset with myself for not remembering how frustrating and not helpful the help desk is most of the time.

Definitely excluding the PCT help desk. They are so different that it feels like a different universe.

Feb 7, 2024 11:01:49 AM Richard Schafer via Patentpractice <patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com<mailto:patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com>>:
I agree with everything Carl said.  We don’t know anything about when Assignment Center was designed, but since it came out later, it’s reasonable to assume that the design was done after Patent Center.  Given how many complaints there were about the lack of shared access in Patent Center, it’s really annoying that the PTO didn’t learn anything from that when they were developing Assignment Center.
You might even think that the PTO designed Assignment Center without paying any attention to what the patent practitioner community wants.
Best regards,
Richard A. Schafer | Schafer IP Law
P.O. Box 230081 | Houston, TX 77223
M: 832.283.6564 | richard at schafer-ip.com<mailto:richard at schafer-ip.com>
From: Carl Oppedahl <carl at oppedahl.com<mailto:carl at oppedahl.com>>
Sent: Wednesday, February 7, 2024 2:23 AM
To: For patent practitioners. This is not for laypersons to seek legal advice. <patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com<mailto:patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com>>
Subject: Re: [Patentpractice] Assignment Center - can you save progress part way through? No

What Richard said.  And recall that for each account, the USPTO uses a particular data field to keep extremely close track of whether the accountholder has or has not shown a photo ID and so on to prove exactly who they are.  And the various USPTO systems then permit or deny access depending on the status of that data field.  There has been a "system creep" of the use of that field, most recently for access to the TEAS functions.  I would be astonished if the system creep were to do anything other than eventually reach all USPTO systems that use any kind of login.  And I would also be astonished if the system creep requiring user login were to do anything other than to eventually reach nearly all USPTO systems.

Meaning, if you were to try to use a single account as if it were a multi-person role-based account, it would quickly come to light in the USPTO login/authentication workflow.

Coming back around to the starting point of the earlier poster, what all of this means is that if the USPTO were to set a goal of being nice to its paying customers, the USPTO would from the beginning of each software initiative) design into the system collaborative workflow, project sharing, access sharing, second-pair-of eyes sharing, and so on.

The challenge is that as a general rule, such "sharing" functions need to have been designed in from the very beginnings of the system design.  It is almost always nearly impossible to "add in" these kinds of sharing functions in any sensible way if you wait until long after the system is fully designed and deployed and only then try to do it.

To give an example of doing it right, the ePCT system was designed from the very outset so that an eOwner could selectively give access to selected applications to others, including giving eOwner access to others.  From the outset, there was the ability to "share" an address book of frequently used inventor names, applicant names, and so on.  From the outset, it was (and still is) the ability to pick and choose levels of access (eViewer, eOwner, eEditor) to give to various colleagues, clients, inventors and so on.  From the outset, the group of people being given any particular level of access could be specifically tied to individual choices about particular applications (not linked in any required all-or-nothing way to "all files having a particular customer number" or "all files that I the attorney get to see when I log in").

In Patent Center, if you as an attorney have access to, say, 2037 applications, and if you decide to "sponsor" a particular paralegal, then the only choice is, that paralegal gets access to 2037 applications.  It is impossible for you the attorney to be selective about which of those 2037 applications the paralegal has access to.

In Assignment Center it is, apparently, impossible to give any kind of access in your own workbench to any colleague.  No shared access for workflow, no shared access for sharing "stored data".

And the problem is that if the software developer failed to design in any kind of shared access starting at the beginning, it almost always turns out to be either impossible, or only very clunky, to try to graft on any shared access to another person.

To give another example of USPTO getting it wrong on "shared acccess", look at Financial Manager (FM).  If a new employee starts work with your firm and needs to be given "shared access", then the click path to onboard that new employee in FM is some number of clicks (these days around eight clicks) times the number of payment methods.  So if you have, say, ten payment methods, then the onboarding process is eighty mouse clicks.  It is impossible to tell FM with just a few mouse clicks "give this new person access to the following selected seven payment methods" or "give this person access to all of our firm's payment methods".  When an employee has a "last day of work", the process in FM to turn off that employee's access to all of the ten payment methods will be ... sorry to say ... a corresponding eighty mouse clicks.

All because the setup of FM, from the outset, failed to be smart about how shared access would work.

In contrast, in ePCT, the "last day of work" click path is only a few mouse clicks regardless of the number of applications involved.  But this is the case only because the designers of ePCT had designed that system from day one to have sensible shared access.
On 2/6/2024 2:44 PM, Richard Schafer via Patentpractice wrote:
I’m pretty sure that the PTO rules require every account to be for a single person only and disallow this kind of role-based multi-person account.

Best regards,
Richard A. Schafer | Schafer IP Law
P.O. Box 230081 | Houston, TX 77223
M: 832.283.6564 | richard at schafer-ip.com<mailto:richard at schafer-ip.com>

From: Patentpractice <patentpractice-bounces at oppedahl-lists.com><mailto:patentpractice-bounces at oppedahl-lists.com> On Behalf Of James Katz via Patentpractice
Sent: Tuesday, February 6, 2024 5:21 AM
To: For patent practitioners. This is not for laypersons to seek legal advice. <patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com><mailto:patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com>
Cc: James Katz <jkatz at lsk-iplaw.com><mailto:jkatz at lsk-iplaw.com>
Subject: Re: [Patentpractice] Assignment Center - can you save progress part way through? No

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.

Jim

James L. Katz
patent attorney
312.854.8372 ▪ direct
312.291.0864 ▪ fax
jkatz at lsk-iplaw.com<mailto:jkatz at lsk-iplaw.com>

LEMPIA SUMMERFIELD KATZ LLC
20 south clark street, suite 600 ▪ chicago, illinois 60603  ▪ www.lsk-iplaw.com<http://www.lsk-iplaw.com/>

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From: Patentpractice <patentpractice-bounces at oppedahl-lists.com<mailto:patentpractice-bounces at oppedahl-lists.com>> on behalf of Carl Oppedahl via Patentpractice <patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com<mailto:patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com>>
Date: Monday, February 5, 2024 at 10:57 PM
To: For patent practitioners. This is not for laypersons to seek legal advice. <patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com<mailto:patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com>>
Cc: Carl Oppedahl <carl at oppedahl.com<mailto:carl at oppedahl.com>>
Subject: [Patentpractice] Assignment Center - can you save progress part way through? No

Nope, it turns out to be impossible to save the submission package part way through.  See https://blog.oppedahl.com/some-of-the-defects-in-the-new-assignment-center/ .
On 1/29/2024 4:15 PM, Carl Oppedahl via Patentpractice wrote:

Yes, it looks like that.

It looks like if the exact same person wants to save progress and come back, they maybe can do that.  There is one extremely blurry slide toward the beginning of the slide deck that gives the impression that you can do that.  But it looks like it is impossible to pass a partially completed filing project over to a colleague for a "second pair of eyes".  Or to pass it to a colleague for e-signature.
On 1/29/2024 4:05 PM, James Katz via Patentpractice wrote:
It also seems that they removed any ability to “save progress” or otherwise save a submission for review before it is submitted.

So there goes our workflow where our assistants upload an assignment and save it before submission, then forward the EPAS link to the attorney for review before the assistant then submits.

Jim

James L. Katz
patent attorney
312.854.8372 ▪ direct
312.291.0864 ▪ fax
jkatz at lsk-iplaw.com<mailto:jkatz at lsk-iplaw.com>

LEMPIA SUMMERFIELD KATZ LLC
20 south clark street, suite 600 ▪ chicago, illinois 60603  ▪ www.lsk-iplaw.com<http://www.lsk-iplaw.com/>

Please note:   This message is intended for the individual or entity named above and may constitute a privileged and confidential communication.  If you are not the intended recipient, please do not read, copy, use, or disclose this message.  Please notify the sender by replying to this message, and then delete the message from your system.  Thank you.


From: Patentpractice <patentpractice-bounces at oppedahl-lists.com><mailto:patentpractice-bounces at oppedahl-lists.com> on behalf of Carl Oppedahl via Patentpractice <patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com><mailto:patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com>
Date: Monday, January 29, 2024 at 4:57 PM
To: patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com<mailto:patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com> <patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com><mailto:patentpractice at oppedahl-lists.com>
Cc: Carl Oppedahl <carl at oppedahl.com><mailto:carl at oppedahl.com>
Subject: [Patentpractice] some initial reactions to the USPTO's training slides for son-of-EPAS

Cumbersome login now required.  It used to be that anybody could submit an assignment for recordation.  Now you have to do a cumbersome login with two-factor authentication.  I suspect this means the person doing the recordation session will have previously been forced to do a Real ID or other invasive prove-who-you-are procedure.

Stupid terminology.  The designer of son-of-EPAS calls the recordation session "filing an application".  This is nuts.

No functional enhancements for the paying customer.  After all this big talk about how wonderful this son-of-EPAS system is going to be, I clicked around a bit to try to see what functional enhancements it is going to provide.  For example I figured the least they would do is make it so that you can check the status of a recordation submission.  Nope.  No enhancements of any kind so far as I can see.

Blocks you from including an application number that they can't find in their system.  It looks like if your patent application is not in Patentcenter, you will be blocked from including it in your recordation submission.  I suspect this means it will be impossible to record against a PCT application filed in an Office that is not the RO/US.


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