[Pct] Notification/reporting correspondence to clients - PDF vs. email body

[Carl Oppedahl]

On 2/14/2024 2:08 PM, Timothy Snowden via Pct wrote:
> Another vote for email body reporting. There are some very good 
> foreign associates that still do all their reporting in a separate 
> letter. I've found that a) it takes me and our docketing staff more 
> time, b) it is more frequent for a possible action item to be missed / 
> delayed, c) it takes up more file storage. I have found no positives.

Yes the foreign agents who send a one-line email that says please see 
attached (PDF) letter of instructions.   It always makes lots and lots 
of extra work for me.  Invariably what happens is I need to reply to it, 
and it says five or a dozen things in the PDF letter, each of which 
would benefit from my interleaved responses.   And the PDF letter is 
sometimes an image scan, because (I guess) they feel it is important to 
capture the blue-ink physical signature.


So when the time comes for me to reply, with my interleaved 
topic-specific responses, I have to convert the PDF letter into ordinary 
text that shows up as "quoted" text in the body of my response.  And I 
then interject my topic-specific responses.


If the instructions from foreign counsel had been /*in the body of*/ 
their email to me, the response from me might have taken five or ten 
minutes.  Instead the response from me takes twenty or thirty minutes.


The extra time does find its way into the invoices that I send to those 
foreign firms.  So I don't actually lose money on that time burden.

But to take Timothy's point, yes the extra-steps-required process of 
dealing with the PDF instructions does lead to extra opportunities for 
me to miss something.  Like the little place, tucked away in some corner 
of the PDF instructions letter, where they quietly mention that the 
applicant is or is not a small entity.  Or whatever.



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