[Patentpractice] astonishing slowness from "helpaia"

[Carl Oppedahl]

Wow.  You can send an email to helpaia at uspto.gov 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.

We paid the Issue Fee in one of our cases on March 3, 2025, and as so 
often happens these days, it was /*after I paid the Issue Fee*/ 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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(As an aside, I cannot now recall how I stumbled upon helpaia at uspto.gov 
as a place to go to try to get help.)

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.

Anyway, here is the astonishing thing.   Today, October 9, 2025 I 
received a response to the "helpaia" email.  It came from 
"helpaau at uspto.gov" 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".

There are several learning opportunities floating around in this odd 
sequence of events.

First, apparently helpaia at uspto.gov 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.

Second, we note that it took more than five months for this email to 
elicit a response.

Have you used helpaia?  Did it work for you?

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