eCommerce Modernization Patent Center Beta Release

The "Search for a patent application" field on the Patent Center home page should be revised to include attorney docket number as one of the options for searching. PAIR allows for searching by attorney docket number, and it is very common for a practitioner to search by attorney docket number. Thanks.

EFS provides a list of recent filings (the 40 most recent, but the number is not important). PatentCenter does not. It should.

Currently in Patent Center you must actively click the search icon to get started. It would be awesome if users could enter their search term then launch the search by hitting the Enter key.

Please ensure consistency in the way inventor names are displayed. In several records some inventor names are displayed as First Middle Last while others are listed as Last, First Middle.

The variation can cause inadvertent errors that cost the applicant to fix.

There is no apparent way that I can find for scrolling through the Documents and Transactions view of a patent application record (corresponding to the Transaction History tab and IFW tab in PAIR). There should be. The only way I have found to navigate those screens is to tab across the column headings, which eventually skips down to the bottom of the page, allowing the number of items on a page to be reduced to the... more »

Currently the Applicant is not consistently listed for AIA applications in Patent Center. It would also be helpful to have the inventors listed when they have by default become the Applicant. Listing inventors when an assignee-applicant should be listed will help practitioners see when correction is needed.

Not sure why there has been a reversion to not allowing for embedded fonts in PDF documents. 🙄 Patent Center was working like a charm previously and allowed for the uploading of PDF documents that EFS-Web did not. The extra work required to make PDF documents image based when converting them from a word processing program is cumbersome and time consuming. Please eliminate the embedded font issue... more »

On the Electronic Acknowledgement Receipt for filing any documents, Patent Center specifies in the FILED BY field the name of the person who uploaded the documents for filing. But where a practitioner's sponsored assistant uploads documents and the practitioner is the one who reviews and submits the uploaded documents, that field should specify the practitioner's name rather than the sponsored assistant's name, since... more »

The transaction history is a great place to get an idea of what is going on with an application, however, it would be awesome to have a real-time status option for where an Amendment or Response is on the Examiner's docket. Similar to the ability to download documents from the IFW in various formats, include an option to view the status of the Amendment or Response. Status could be as simple as: 1) Docketed - Action... more »

When using the Workbench to search for applications by specific criteria, it would be awesome to have the ability to move from one record to the next by clicking a button from the Application Data screen or even every screen of information. The buttons could appear near the top next to the Global Dossier button. A bonus would be to include the ability to jump to a specific record by entering a number between 1 and the... more »

The button that says "File another patent application" (and other prompts like that throughout Patent Center) should instead prompt the user to process another submission. Most of our submissions via EFS (and now Patent Center) are not applications but are rather documents related to existing applications. So the prompt to file another "patent application" is not correct. That was an error in EFS. It would be great... more »

Emailed EBC about having the First Action Prediction Tab added to the Patent Center so that status letters can be requested for matters that are not yet being prosecuted.

Please look into the speed issue with Patent Center. For the past few weeks Patent Center has been performing much slower than Private PAIR (when PAIR is operating).

Users will be slow to accept and adopt Patent Center if users do not see improvement with speed and access.

Patent Center seems to not be associating the attorney docket number of a submission with a fee payment for that submission. When going from Patent Center to the fee payment page, the fee payment confirmation shows an "Attorney Docket #" column, but it's empty. This results in accounting problems for the practitioner, where the practitioner cannot readily tell from deposit account payment records what attorney docket... more »

Our workflow is that a paralegal uploads the documents to be submitted, the attorney reviews them, and if correct, instructs the paralegal to submit. What we are seeing is that, once the attorney reviews the uploaded documents, the paralegal then no longer has those documents in her Workbench, and cannot submit the reviewed documents. This seems like a bug. I hope it's not a "feature."