America-Israel Patent Law Blog

One of the many defective aspects of the ILPTO's electronic filing system for patents is its failure to generate a downloadable receipt of submissions upon making those submissions.  You upload the the documents for filing, press submit, and then it all disappears into the ether.  Sometime later, you get an email acknowledging your submission, with the files you submitted attached. 

Typically the wait for that receipt is between 10 minutes and 2 hours, although there was an occasion a few months ago when we didn't receive the acknowledgement until about 24 hours later.  Now we've got a new winner for "longest wait for an EFS acknowledgement": on November 17 we filed a response in a case.  More than two days later, we're still waiting for the email acknowledgement of the submission. 

We're not uptight about this one: the submission is now visible on the ILPTO's public patent database.  Even if it weren't, we also paid some fees at the same time, and the system generates the fee payment acknowledgement immediately, so we have that in hand.  And we're not up against the deadline yet, so we could re-submit if needed – not that that's a particularly efficient way to work.  Regardless, we still haven't received the email acknowledging the submission.

Message to the ILPTO: fix this. The system should generate a submission receipt as soon as the submission is made. As they say in Hebrew, that's aleph-bet.