America-Israel Patent Law Blog

To anyone who's filed more than a handful of powers of attorney or assignments at the USPTO, it's well-known that the USPTO sometimes bounces these things for seemingly capricious reasons, often relating to the title given for the person who signed the documents, with the assertion that it's not apparent that the signer is authorized to sign the document. 

Thus, this week on one of the listservs to which I subscribe (yes, there are still listservs, and I subscribe to some of them because they're populated by some very knowledgeable and very helpful people), a question arose regarding signatures on documents filed at the USPTO. And in the response thread, David Boundy produced the 2-page document shown below. It's a list of acceptable descriptions that the USPTO regards as self-evidently showing authorization to sign, as well as some descriptions that are no-nos.

What's remarkable is that at the bottom of each page, the document is marked "Internal Use ONLY". In other words, "We're not gonna tell the public what's ok and what's not, those people out there are just gonna have to guess".  That's not only inefficient, it's illegal. And to make matters worse, I've seen some documents bounced by the USPTO where the signer used one of the "acceptable" descriptions.

This seems to be par for the course at the USPTO, which since at least May 19 has has announced on its website that "Patent Center has 100% of the functionality of EFS-Web, Public and Private PAIR, and is available to all users for electronic filing and management of patent applications."

It should come as no surprise that DB was only provided with this document following a Freedom of Information Act request.