| You complained that your examination report is taking a long time to issue. |
We sent a letter explaining the situation with high volumes of work and gave a date as to when the report should be issued. |
| You made an urgent request for a copy of a file. After several telephone conversations and weeks of waiting you had still not received it. |
We apologised for the difficulties encountered in relation to this request and let you know about what we are doing to avoid such problems in the future. |
| You complained about the length of time it was taking to receive his examination report & no explanation or apology was issued. |
The exam report was issued along with an EL1 paragraph apologising for the time taken and a reminder that the compliance period is extended to 12 months after the first exam report. |
| The hearing officer refused your application for restoration as it was filed outside the period prescribed by the rules. You complained that the office's action was disgusting & you wished to discuss the matter further. |
You raised a number of points including; the hearing officer had only been standing in for the comptroller, why appeals are filed at the high court and that you had filed an extension of time at the court but was concerned as you had not heard anything as yet. We addressed each of your enquiries and assisted
you where possible. You thanked us for our assistance although you were still not happy with the outcome. |
| Following a request from the hearings clerk that you inform us whether you wish a hearing in relation to your Patent application or would prefer a decision on the papers, you filed a complaint by email in which you raise a number of issues and concerns. |
We sent a response covering amongst other things, the nature of a hearing and the hearing officer’s role. |
| You advised us that the Trade Mark classification team had put the phone down three times and would not confirm to you who you were speaking to. |
We apologised for the situation and passed on the complaint to the relevant senior manager who is going to take this up and investigate accordingly. |
| You raised the issue of a request for a copy of a Patent file which had been handled poorly by the office. |
We wrote to you to apologise and to inform you of steps taken so that staff are well trained in office copies, a new reminder system is also to be put in place. |
| You complained about the quality of the cited documents after an SAS search. After further investigation about the specific problems with the search and were unhappy with the fact that no documents related to their main embodiment were cited. |
We agreed that some further searching should be carried out which we did promptly, and a supplementary search report was issued. Guidance is to be fed into the upcoming SAS refresher training course that is being planned. |
| You were encouraged by Amazon to buy a booked supposedly written by Jane Austen. |
We replied after speaking to our Copyright enforcement team and they confirmed that this should be handled by your local trading standards office who we then referred you to. |
| You advised us that people have sent Patent applications to the Harmsworth House address and have had their applications returned meaning that the Royal mail has had to open the letter to return it. |
We spoke to Royal Mail about this and they confirmed that there are now a further three re-directions put in place on top of the original three "The Patent Office, IPO, UKIPO". The three new ones are "The Comptroller, The Registrar and Company Names Tribunal", this was done on the advice of our legal section. |
| Following the receipt of a SAS customer feedback form you responded by saying the search report was disappointing as it only cited one document which bore little relationship to the subject matter of the development. Your client had so little confidence in the results that they had commissioned a further search with another provider. |
We did a quality review of the search independently of the examiner conducted. Having analysed the results in the alternative search commissioned it is clear that some of the documents cited were considered by our examiner and dismissed as not being worth citing. Of those documents cited in the search report not considered by our Examiner all were in original classified set selected for sifting keywords. |
| You advised that a name search had been conducted by a back-up SAS examiner for a number of company names to identify all GB and EP (UK) patents and patent applications in these names. You noted your concern that we had not identified all relevant patents/patent applications, since our
list did not include some of those patent documents that the customer was already aware of. Therefore, you had no confidence in the results of the search. |
We got another SAS examiner to repeat the search, and discovered that the original search examiner had failed to scroll through all of the individual pages on OPTICS for one of the company names, only listing those patent applications listed on the front page. An amended report with all patent applications listed was issued to replace the earlier report. We explained
that this search was taken on by a very newly recruited back-up examiner, during the holiday season
when no other qualified examiners were available to do the search, or to provide guidance on how the
search should be done. In the future, we will endeavour to ensure that all back-up examiners are given proper training, which
unfortunately was not possible on this occasion due to bad timing. |
