America-Israel Patent Law Blog

The ILPTO’s filing system for patents underwent a substantive re-design in 2025, and it still leaves much to be desired.  One of its biggest problems is that it doesn’t immediately generate a filing acknowledgement upon hitting the “submit” button.  Instead, prior to submission, we see the list of the files we’ve uploaded, with their filenames and the classification we’ve given them (such as “response to section 18”, “list of corresponding countries”, and “list of citations”); see the screen shot below.

But once we click “submit”, all we’re given is a screen that says, “Your request was successfully submitted!”. That screen tells us nothing about the files we submitted, the patent application in which those files were submitted, or even the time at which the submission took place.

In order to get THAT information, we have to wait for an email from the ILPTO.  That email contains a graphic that shows the application number, the classification that we’ve given each file we submitted, and the size of the file. But it doesn’t include the file name, it doesn’t indicate the time at which the submission took place, and the size of the files is always off by a kilobyte from the actual file size.

It turns out that, until that email is sent, the submission – the one that the ILPTO told us was successfully submitted – isn’t regarded by the system as actually having been submitted. In other words, the ILPTO lies to the patent-seeking public that has no choice but to use its services.

This defect manifested itself earlier this week, when I went to file a “section 18 response” (the Israel equivalent of an IDS). I uploaded the files, clicked submit, and got the “Your request was successfully submitted!” screen, but the email never followed. So the next day, I went through the process again. And again, I got the “Your request was successfully submitted!” screen, but the email never followed.

Since this isn’t the first time I encountered this kind of glitch in the system, after about two hours I logged in again, but instead of creating a new submission package, I went to view my old submission packages.  The system lets us look at completed submissions (i.e., which have been processed into the system and thus docketed for action), submissions being processed, and submissions in progress that have not yet been submitted.  Both of my section 18 responses – the ones that the ILPTO told me had been successfully submitted –  were listed as “in progress”, i.e. not yet submitted.  I chose one of them, clicked through the screens to the “submit screen”, and submitted the filing that I had already submitted earlier.  This time, within a minute I received the “your submission was successfully processed” email.

It turns out this wasn’t a one-off, because later in the week, I heard similar stories from two colleagues. And if we’re aware of the problems, then no doubt the large offices have experienced these problems as well, and complained to the ILPTO about them.

Which leads to the question, since the ILPTO no doubt knew of the problems, why did it not notify the public?  The Office has an email distribution list that it makes frequent use of – this week it sent out notices about proposed examination guidelines and about office hours during the upcoming Rosh Hashana – Yom Kippur – Succot period. Or it could have put a banner warning in the electronic filing system, telling us that the system is acting funny and that if we don’t receive the confirmation email within an hour, to log back in and check our submission packages.

But it did neither of these things.

Must be nice to be a monopoly in which customer service isn’t one of the metrics by which success is measured.