Patent Ombudsman Program

The Patent Ombudsman Program is a new program recently initiated by Director Kappos at the USPTO.  In recent lectures, Commissioner Kappos has described the Ombudsman program as a new and innovative way for the USPTO to improve customer service between itself and patent applicants and their representatives.  Essentially, when there is an impasse or other problem with a particular application and after an applicant or their representative has attempted to resolve the impasse with the examiner in charge of the application and his or her supervisor (SPE) or otherwise exhausted traditional prosecution methods, an ombudsman may be consulted to promote the prosecution of the application. 

The USPTO has set up ombudsmen for each technical center, thus assuring that there will be technical familiarity with the subject matter at hand in each application brought before him or her.  Additionally, the personnel involved with the program are higher level PTO employees and have an emphasis on customer service.  Initial consultations can be made with the ombudsman confidentially and they can provide advice as to how best to proceed, however if you wish for the ombudsman to actively get involved in the matter, the contact with the ombudsman will be revealed to at least the supervisory personnel in the appropriate art unit.  Further, the PTO has implemented a tracking system to determine the ongoing status of claims with the ombudsmen as well as their duration. 

Per the USPTO's guidelines, the ombudsman program is not intended to deal with the merits of the applications in question.  Rather, the program should be used to deal with problems in the progression of examination of an application or group of applications and to determine if there is an issue that can be resolved by the necessary personnel.  Further, to this end, relevant correspondence and action taken by the ombudsman will be made of record in the appropriate application or applications prosecution history(ies). 

We welcome the ombudsman program as another positive implementation of Director Kappos' strategy for the USPTO.  This program should help fulfill a crucial void at eh USPTO and allow for greatly improved customer service relations between the USPTO's personnel and patent applicants and their representatives.