In October 2020, the USPTO proposed a scheme of voluntary continuing legal education (CLE) for patent practitioners. The PTO would be among the CLE providers, and would make a public notation of those practitioners who fulfilled the requirements. The proposal was almost universally panned in the comments that were submitted (including comments from David Boundy, from Neil Ormos, from this writer, and surprisingly forceful comments from the AIPLA).
Last year, the PTO blinked, and said it was temporarily shelving the proposed CLE requirement. Now the PTO reports that in a Federal Register notice to be published on November 14, 2022, it is killing the CLE requirement.
This is a most welcome development. Among other things, for reasons explained in the comments, the proposed plan was not going to “improve patent quality”, and would place an additional, unnecessary burden on practitioners without realizing any substantive benefits.
And yet, the PTO’s tilting at windmills persists, as revealed in recent remarks by PTO Director Kathi Vidal concerning docx filings. I’ll report on that in another blog post, hopefully soon.