The USPTO plans to transition from the current combination of PAIR/EFS/EPAS/FM for submitting and viewing documents and for paying fees to a single system called "Patent Center". Last month the PTO opened Patent Center for beta testing. Carl Oppedahl has been keeping a list of things that absolutely need to get fixed in Patent Center, as well as a list of features that would be nice to have. In that spirit, here's a bug in its operating procedures that the USPTO should fix.
It sometimes happens that a practitioner is asked to take over a US application that hasn't yet been published. Could be a provisional, could be a non-provisional that's still inside 18 months or with a non-publication request. In order to get access to the file, the practitioner needs to file a document granting him permission to inspect the file; most commonly, this is a power of attorney. The USPTO can be finicky about what it wants before it will accept a POA. Sometimes the rejection of a POA is mandated by the law or rules, but sometimes it's a clerk making things up as s/he goes along. Either way, the result is the same: the new practitioner can't look at the file online.
The problem is that if the POA is rejected, the PTO will only inform the party that submitted the POA about the rejection by snail mail. If the PTO is already corresponding with someone else about the application by email - like the attorney who's being taken off the case - it will send an email notice to that person that the POA (filed by someone else) has been rejected. Otherwise, the notice rejecting the POA will also be sent by snail mail to the current correspondence address.
If the application is already published and thus visible in public PAIR, the submitter of the new POA can see that the POA was rejected. But if the application is unpublished, and the POA is rejected, it can take time - a few weeks, if you're overseas - for a paper "notice of informal power of attorney" to arrive. If the submitter is lucky, and the current correspondence address is a law firm or practitioner that receives PTO correspondence by email, that party may, if it's nice, look at the rejected POA and, if it can figure out the email address of the party that submitted the POA, forward the "your POA was rejected" email to the submitter. Otherwise, the submitter just has to wait to find out that the POA it submitted was rejected.
In cases in which the new POA is submitted via EFS by a registered practitioner, the USPTO's practice of only sending the rejection notice by snail mail is silly and inefficient. The PTO has email addresses for registered practitioners who are EFS users, and for the customer numbers that are often listed on POAs as the new address for service. In such cases, there's no reason not to send the "notice of informal POA" by email to the party that submitted it.
I suspect this practice has its roots in the PTO's computer system being able to hold only one correspondence address at a time, but I can't believe it would be a big deal to fix the system so that POA rejection notices are emailed to the EFS user that submitted them as well as to the party currently listed as the correspondence address.