America-Israel Patent Law

Why Is the Israel PTO Advertising For a Private Company?

According to an email announcement in Hebrew sent earlier this month and for which a reminder was sent today, on January 30, the Israel PTO will be holding a video training session covering two topics: how to use an AI search tool from a particular company to look for publications in assessing patentability of ideas and validity of patents, and how to utilize the Israel PTO patent database. The full text of the notice appears below; readers who don’t read Hebrew can cut-and-paste into a machine translation program.

The State of Israel imposes restrictions on its employees in order to avoid conflicts-of-interest, to the point that I can’t buy a friend who works in the Patent Office a cup of coffee if we meet at a restaurant. So I’m confused, to put it mildly, by the fact that the Patent Office is sponsoring what appears to be an advertisement for a particular company. To me, this is akin to the Office running a session on how to use Microsoft Word or Google Drive.

This isn’t the first time the Israel PTO has played favorites. In the past it has sent out notices upon the deaths of certain patent practitioners, but not upon the deaths of others. I don’t see where it’s the ILPTO’s place to send out death notices about ANY practitioners.

ציבור המבקשים, עורכי הדין ועורכי הפטנטים שלום רב,

תזכורת: ביום שלישי הקרוב, 30.1.24, בשעה 12:30 תתקיים הדרכה לציבור על מנוע החיפוש סימלארי  ועל אתר החיפוש של רשות הפטנטים.

על מנת שנוכל לעסוק בנושאים המעניינים אתכם, נודה לכם אם תקדישו כמה דקות לכתיבת נושאים ושאלות בקישור המצ"ב.

כמו כן, לטובת הציבור, מצורפת ההודעה על תוכן ההדרכה המתוכננת וקישור למפגש:

שימוש במנוע חיפוש מבוסס בינה מלאכותית ולמידה עמוקה של חברת סימילארי בע"מ לחיפוש ידע קודם, הפתוח לרשות הציבור ללא עלות.

בנוסף, במסגרת זו נציג גם את כלל האפשרויות הקיימות  ב'אתר החיפוש' של רשות הפטנטים.
מאגר זה מכיל מידע עדכני על פטנטים שהוגשו בישראל ומאפשר ביצוע חיפוש במאגר באמצעות מאפיינים שונים.

המידע הקיים באתר כולל נתונים ביבליוגרפים בהתאם למצב הפרסום של בקשת הפטנט ואת האפשרויות הבאות:

• צפייה בנסח הפטנט
• הפקת תדפיס הנסח
• צפייה במסמכי בקשות לפטנט שהתפרסם דבר קיבולן (תקציר, טופס הבקשה, פירוט, תביעות, שרטוטים).
• אפשרות לעיון באתר בכל המסמכים הנוגעים לבקשות לפטנט שנפתחו לעיון הציבור בהתאם לסעיף 16 (א) לחוק
• שמירת חיפושים וקבלת התראות בעדכון החיפוש

ההדרכה תתקיים ביום שלישי ה30 לינואר בין 12:30- 13:30

קישור מצ"ב

 

Did the USPTO Implicitly Acknowledge Last Week's IT System Failure?

Last week, the USPTO's computer systems crashed. Not just on the patent side, but also the trademark side Sometimes you could get in, sometimes you couldn't...eventually I found myself completely unable to access the USPTO's computers - not even the USPTO's homepage, www.uspto.gov - unless I changed something in my browser's setting (the DNS setting, for those of you who are interested; I would never have figured this out on my own but a nice computer-savvy colleague in the USA figure this out.)

 

During this system crash, I needed to file a response to a notice of missing parts in a national phase application to reduce the number of claims and eliminate multiple dependent claims, so as to avoid paying excess claim fees.  I was able to file the response on Tuesday the 16th, which was timely. But by the same deadline I also needed to pay a surcharge for the late submission of the inventor declarations, and because of the PTO's IT issues, I was only able to pay that on Wednesday. (In principle one can fax a credit card payment form to the USPTO, but on Tuesday that was not an option in this case).

 

This left me wondering, is the USPTO now going to make me pay an extension fee, as penance for the PTO's self-induced computer glitches?  I decided to wait and see what happens, and determined that if I didn't get a filing receipt by the one-month extension deadline, I would pay the extension fee.

 

This week I got my answer: a revised filing receipt, and change in the status of the application to "docketed - ready for examination", as well a notation in the transaction history "application is now complete".  No extension fee necessary.

 

I'm not sure if the processing of my response was due to someone's oversight (i.e. I was expected to pay an extension fee, and someone didn't notice I didn't pay it), or if the PTO is implicitly acknowledging its screw-up. If the latter, it would have been nice if the PTO posted a notice to all of us who had payment problems, informing us that the payment deadline was extended and no extension fee was due.

More Fun With the Israel PTO Patent Electronic Filing System

I could write about the USPTO colossal electronic system screw-up this week…but that will wait for a later blog post. Today we’re going to discuss the ILPTO EFS, particularly its new interface for filing new applications.

As mentioned in a previous post, in September the Israel PTO announced, with much fanfare, that it was changing its interface for filing new patent applications, but that, as far as I could tell, the only significant difference from the old interface was that now it will populate the information for PCT national phase applications with data taken directly from WIPO.

After playing with the system more since then, I’ve found that my initial assessment was correct. And there are some clunky parts to the new interface: you have to log in, then indicate you want to file a new application, but then you’re directed to a page telling you to login again.  Clicking on the appropriate button takes you to the next screen, but if you’re already logged in, why should you have to click the button again?

And once you get to that next screen, it’s not immediately clear where you need to click in order to file a new application. (Turns out it’s בקשה לפטנט in the top middle of the screen.)

I also found what seemed at first to be a bug: you can’t enter national phase before the PCT application has published, because the system doesn’t have data to draw from. It gives an error message: “unable to obtain data from WIPO”. Well, duh. What’s not immediately apparent – but was explained to me subsequently by a colleague – is that there’s a button saying “continue”, which allows you to manually enter the data. That button should say “click here to manually input the data”.

And as I noted in the previous post, the fact that you don’t get an acknowledgement of what was filed is unacceptable. You can see the names of the files that you ostensibly submitted, but there’s no way to verify that what is actually in the ILPTO’s system is what you submitted. Sorry, ILPTO, that doesn’t cut it.

There is one improvement on the way that they announced this week: they’re going to start pulling the application documents from WIPO, instead of requiring applicants to submit the specification, claims, drawings and sequence listings themselves. (Applicants will still have the option of filing their own documents.)  This will save filers some time, but I’m not sure this complies with the ILPTO’s own rules about filing: the ILPTO ostensibly requires filers to submit searchable pdfs, but the pdf files obtained from WIPO are not searchable. (Actually, when they introduced the EFS in late 2015, the fact that they were asking for searchable pdfs but WIPO only provides non-searchable pdfs was a complaint that was raised, and I think this is a “requirement” that’s generally honored in the breach.) On the other hand, this may be the first time a government office anywhere in world voluntarily made things more difficult for itself in an effort to make things easier for the public to which it provides service.

Is Kamala Harris Working on the USPTO's IT Systems?

As of right now, the USPTO is set to kill EFS and PAIR at 23:59 on November 14 so that we'll be left with only the defective "Patent Center" to file and check our patent documents at the USPTO. Of course, that was supposed to happen last week, but the USPTO blinked at the last minute. Maybe it will do so again. It certainly hasn't consulted with users to make sure that PC does what it's supposed to do.  And it keeps doing more and more asinine things on its way to forcing PC down users' throats. 

For example, starting about two weeks ago, PC started gagging on files being submitted, saying that there's a problem with the naming of the file. Did it tell anyone the exact problem? No, of course, not, because we all have time to guess. Turns out - after much guessing - that whereas hitherto the USPTO systems accepted pdf files in a case-insensitive manner, viz. you could file a pdf document named filename.PDF or filename.pdf, some brilliant IT developer made it so that you can only file with the .pdf part of the name in lowercase letters.

What kind of a cockamamie system does that?!

And to justify this change, the PTO pointed to a hitherto never-enforced "rule", that says that filetype extension have to be in lowercase. Seriously? Are you really such a-holes? The statute said that continuations have to be filed before the parent case issues, but the PTO's practice for years was to allow continuations to be filed on the day the parent case issues, and when the matter came before the Federal Circuit several years ago, it said, "Yeah, we know what the statute says, but we're not going to upset long-held practice." Filing with documents labeled .PDF, in all caps, never bothered you before. Why'd you go out of your way to be jerks? Or was this a screw-up, because you didn't ask people what they do, and now you have to cover your rear ends by pointing to never-enforced, illogical provision of some rule?

This isn't trivial: apparently there's law office management software used by lots of firms that generates documents as filename.PDF.

Maybe part of the issue is something noticed by Pam Brisky, an IP paralegal working at a large company.  She found the following announcement from April 2022 (red added by me):

"Steampunk Awarded $2B BOSS Prime Contract at USPTO

"MCLEAN, Va., April 21, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Steampunk, Inc. is excited to announce that it has been awarded a United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Business Oriented Software Solutions (BOSS) contract. The objective of the BOSS contract is to procure services and expertise, primarily in the form of Agile Teams, that drive effectiveness and deliver on a key USPTO metric of "delivering business value to our customers, frequently, predictably, and with high quality". The BOSS contract will support the USPTO's priority to implement its Agile New Ways of Working (NWOW) to enable an IT stabilization and modernization journey with customer business value at the heart of its decisions and actions.  Steampunk is one of five total awardees, and one of three small business awardees, of the Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract with a 10-year Period of Performance (POP) and $2 Billion cumulative ceiling.

"Matt Warren, Steampunk CEO said, "Steampunk is humbled and honored for the opportunity to bring new thinking and innovation to the USPTO BOSS program through our Design Intelligence^® Framework to drive business value and reduce operational risk to the organization.  We look forward to working with the USPTO teams to advance their capabilities and provide efficiencies within the USPTO product lines that support and protect innovators who play an enormous role in the US economy." 

"Steampunk began supporting the USPTO last year as an Intelligent Automation and Innovation Support Services (IAISS) Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) awardee. Jay Danielski, the Steampunk Director of Operations for contracts with USPTO said, "We are incredibly excited to continue to support the USPTO IT Modernization journey, building on the DevSecOps and Agile support we currently provide to USPTO. The BOSS award and task order opportunities provide us yet another opportunity to continue to enact positive change and business value." 

"Steampunk is a Change Agent in the Federal contracting industry, bringing new thinking to clients in the Homeland, Federal Civilian, Health, and DoD sectors. Through our Human-Centered delivery framework, we are fundamentally changing the expectations our federal clients have for true shared accountability in solving their toughest mission challenges. As an employee-owned company, we focus on investing in our employees to enable them to do the greatest work of their careers – and rewarding them for outstanding contributions to our growth. If you want to learn more about our story, visit http://www.steampunk.com."

Sounds like Kamala Harris speaking. If anyone understands what those highlighted strings of words mean, please let me know. Must be nice to get $200 million per year for having an "Indefinite Delivery" contract of "Indefinite Quality". It certainly doesn't seem to require producing anything useful.

Hey, Kathi Vidal: how about if your office just does what it's supposed to do, which is to examine patent applications?

 

USPTO: Most Definitely Public Sector. Which Really, Really Sucks.

Early in the current war, a group of hi tech workers in Israel got together and wrote code to help them identify missing people, employing AI to assist. They did it in just a few days, and the state used the results to help figure out who might have been kidnapped.

Similarly, my wife has been involved in obtaining donations and then using the funds to buy equipment for soldiers. To help her save time tracking which donations have been received, in what amounts, from whom, for which unit, where the money was spent, and to keep track of receipts of both income and expenditures, a woman from our synagogue wrote some code. Did a Zoom meeting with my wife to understand the needs, and then wrote the code. Took her less than a day. Took her an hour to do a tweak when my wife realized there was something else she needed. My wife is most appreciative (as am I).

Then there’s the USPTO, which appears set to screw up things as much as possible for everyone, and which has no shame whatsoever about it.

The USPTO currently has multiple systems on the patent side, primarily EFS for submitting documents and PAIR for looking at documents. It’s not an ideal arrangement, but it works, even though the USPTO has been steadily downgrading both systems over the past several years.[1] 

Clearly, what would be better is an integrated system that combines filing and document-inspection functions. WIPO has such a system – ePCT – and it’s wonderful. You file things, you can see them immediately, there’s good tech support during working hours, and most importantly, WIPO asks users how to improve the system.

Rather than adopt ePCT, the USPTO has been working on “Patent Center” for many years now – alpha testing began in 2017. So convinced was the USPTO that Patent Center is the greatest thing since sliced bread that they announced in September that November 7, 2023 would be the last day of operation of PAIR and EFS. 

But Patent Center still isn’t ready for prime time. Over the past several years, the members of the “PatentCenter listserv” maintained by Carl Oppedahl have compiled a long list of both bugs and desired features in Patent Center. Some of those bugs have been there for four years. Does the USPTO listen? No. Does it address the bugs, or add the features? Sometimes, but it doesn’t tell anyone when it does. And sometimes it breaks things further, like this week when they decided you can’t file pdf files that end in .PDF, in uppercase letters. No, now in Patent Center you have to file with a lowercase ending - .pdf.  Even though both EFS and Patent Center have hitherto accepted .PDF endings. Did they announce they’d be doing this? Of course not. Users had to waste time figuring out the problem. You can’t make this up.

This is what happens when the US federal government tries to develop software. It has to issue a bid for proposals, because supposedly this increases competition and lowers costs. But it has the opposite effect: rather than lowering the cost and improving the quality of the work, there are apparently only a few vendors who qualify to bid, so in the end they not only charge a ton, they stink at what they do. And God forbid  

On top of it, the USPTO is, to put it charitably, less than forthright with the public. They don’t acknowledge problems, they don’t fix most things, and when they do fix things they don’t say they’ve been fixed. And as noted above, recently they’ve been breaking things without telling anyone. 

Last month several representatives of the listserv community met with some PTO people. One of those representatives flew into DC from Texas, another from Colorado. Several days before they had sent the PTO a slide deck of issues to be discussed. So while these folks are in transit, just a few hours before the meeting, the USPTO sends out its own slide deck, having nothing to do with the problems with Patent Center, and then uses those slides at the meeting, essentially lecturing the non-PTO people about the greatness of Patent Center.  A similar thing transpired on Monday of this week, when representatives of the National Association of Patent Practitioners met with people from the PTO: no acknowledgment that Patent Center is FUBAR. Criminy, USPTO, even your own Electronic Business Center people have been telling people that when things don’t work in PC, they should use EFS instead – the same EFS that’s about to get shut down.

This condescending attitude from the incompetent USPTO pervades its approach to IT. We complained about docx filing and said that the PTO should take pdf files as the controlling document, and allow users to file .docx as an adjunct; instead, Director Kathi Vidal says they’ll deign to let us a pdf with our docx files, but this favor that she’s doing us is only temporary.

Amazingly, today on the USPTO’s patent center page, under “known issues and workarounds”, it lists several items that it knows are defective but that it only plans to fix in December or January – AFTER it has killed EFS.

Anyway, last night the PTO blinked, and pushed off the destruction of EFS and PAIR until next week. Apparently they’re now working furiously to fix things in PC. Where were you for the last five years, you jerks?

I don’t know why the USPTO is being so asinine about this. My guess is that the people involved will get bonuses if the program launches by a certain date, regardless of whether it works or not. But I’m super disgusted by the double-standard here: if we practitioners or our clients make false statement to the PTO, we can be fined and even disbarred. But when the PTO people lie to us, as they’ve done repeatedly and consistently for year? No problem.

 

[1] For example, there used be both public PAIR and private PAIR: the former could be used by anyone to look at the documents in any patent applications that had been published, the latter could be used by people with authorization to look at as-yet-unpublished files.  Until about six or seven years ago, private PAIR provided the functionality of public PAIR as well. But then the USPTO decided to completely bifurcate them, so that if you were logged into private PAIR and wanted to look at file wasn’t yours, you had to log out (or open a different browser) and then enter public PAIR. Really, really, stupid.  And then about two years ago they shut down public PAIR, to force users to use Patent Center.

How Is The Patent Grant Date Calculated In Israel (i.e. When is the First Maintenance Fee Due)?

In Israel, after the ILPTO allows an application, the applicant pays a fee, and then notice that the application is allowed - the so-called "acceptance of the application" - is published in the Patents Journal.  This now normally occurs on the 1st of the month on the Gregorian calendar, although if the 1st falls on a day when the ILPTO is closed, then the publication occurs on the next day on which the office is open.  Opponents then have three months - non-extendible - to file a notice of opposition.  But by statute, if THAT deadline falls on a day when the ILPTO is closed, that deadline gets pushed off.  Once the opposition deadline passes without an opposition being filed, the patent automatically grants, although the ILPTO sometimes takes a few days to issue the patent certificate. 

The grant date is important, because maintenance (renewal) fees the deadlines for which occurred during the pendency of the application must be paid within three months of grant - minimally, the fee for years 0-6 of the patent, and sometimes for years 7-10 or even for later years.

This year, patent applications for which the "acceptance of the application" was published on July 1 ostensibly became patents on October 2, assuming no opposition was filed by the end of the October 1 deadline. But the ILPTO was closed on October 1 as part of the intermediate days of the Succot festival, and stayed closed until October 8.  So the deadline to file oppositions should have been yesterday, October 8, with unopposed application issuing at patents on October 9, and the maintenance fee deadline

Imagine my surprise, then, when this morning I received patent certificates for several patents that listed the issue date as October 2, 2023 - a date on which the Office was closed.

I don't imagine this shortchanging of my clients a week to pay their maintenance fees will be an issue, as we usually report patent grants immediately, and 12 weeks to pay should be sufficient. But it would be nice if the ILPTO got its dates right.

Follow up: I emailed the head examiner at the ILPTO, Simona Aharonovitch, about this problem.  Turns out that I alerted them to it last year, and they mostly fixed it, but there's still a glitch: the patent certificates got prepared automatically on October 2, but they weren't mailed until October 9. In fact, potential opponents had the ability to file oppositions through October 8.

What blows my mind is that according to Ms. Aharonovitch, I'm the only one who has ever called this mistake to the PTO's attention.  Evidently the big offices are asleep at the wheel.

Much Ado About... (Israel PTO Patent Filing Back Online)

If you're familiar with Shakespeare's plays, you know the last word in the title above.

It took the Israel PTO longer than expected, but by the end of last Thursday its patent electronic filing system was back online.

As far as I can tell, the only change made was to the interface for filing new patent applications. And the only really significant difference is that if you file a national phase of a PCT (which is something like 95% of patent filing in Israel), the system will now pull the bibliographic information from WIPO. This is certainly a nice feature, but I'm not sure it warranted a meeting at the Israel PTO (and concomitant livestream) to explain that it was being implemented. They did implement something so that now you can see a complete list of the applications you've filed, but as far as I can it's only with respect to what you've filed, and only since they implemented this new feature - none of my old filings show up there.

Otherwise, things haven't changed:

Applicants, even for national phase filings, must still upload the description, drawings and claims as separate pdf files. 

When filing responses, you still have to choose from a pre-set list of document descriptions, which still doesn't include "miscellaneous", and the system still tells you whether or not you can file a particular type of paper in a given application (an aspect of the system that sometimes is a good things but sometimes is not). 

The system still doesn't give you a filing acknowledgement immediately upon filing, showing what you filed with a hash function value so that if necessary later you can prove what you filed; rather, you still have to wait for an email that includes the very documents you filed (although with their size slightly changed) to take up space in your email folder.

When you go to pay a fee, the system still boots you out of EFS and into the government payment system.

And there's still nothing like private PAIR or ePCT that allows the filer to see, immediately after filing, what it is he filed: there's still only a single public database, and the documents in the file only become visible after the application is opened to the public.

Still Waiting for the Israel PTO's Patent E-Filing to Go Back Online

5:34 AM on September 7, system was supposed to be back online at 10:30 yesterday morning.  And no notice or emails from the ILPTO explaining what the problem is - we just get the "under construction" page when we try to go to the EFS page.  This means no filing of new applications, no submission of responses, and no paying of maintenance fees, among other things. I feel sorry for the secretaries who must have been inundated with emails containing things meant for electronic filing.

For the cynical, I have a possible answer to the question about why this work was done on a weekday, and not at a time when the Israel PTO is closed (like the first week of October, which this year will coincides with hol hamoed, the intermediate days of the Succot holiday): yesterday and today, the largest patent firm in Israel is on a retreat, with only a skeleton staff in the office. So when those guys aren't working, it must be ok for the Patent Office to effectively be closed too. That may be pure speculation, but in a small country like Israel it's not an absurd speculation.

At least the Israel Patents Database is still online...which is a good argument for keeping the filing and viewing functions in separate systems. (Hear that, designers of the USPTO's thus-far-atrocious PatentCenter? Oh, right, you never listen to the public anyway...)

Previous posts on the launch of Israel's new patent EFS: New Israel PTO Patent Electronic Filing System - Introductory Meeting, Israel Electronic Patent Filing to be Offline on September 6, Oh Where, Oh Where is My Israel PTO Electronic Filing System?

Oh Where, Oh Where is My Israel PTO Electronic Filing System?

System was supposed to be online today at 10:30. It's now 17:35 and we're still waiting - getting a "this page under construction" (or "undergoing maintenance") screen instead of a login screen. I don't have any deadlines at the ILPTO today but I pity those who do.

I have to ask, again, Why couldn't this work have been done early on Friday the 8th - when the ILPTO is closed and therefore deadlines are pushed off?

Not going to discuss the substance of yesterday's presentation about the new system until after I actually get to work with the system.  But, in memory of a now-defunct blog about IP in Israel, I will say that a friend who was physically present at the ILPTO said the pastries were good.

Israel Electronic Patent Filing to be Offline on September 6

In conjunction with the launch of its new electronic filing system (details of which will only be revealed to the public tomorrow, September 5), the ILPTO announced this morning via its email distribution list that its EFS will be offline on Wednesday, September 6 from midnight until 10:30 AM. Pending filing which have been saved for later submission will be erased as part of this process.

Why this work couldn't have been done early on Friday the 8th - when the ILPTO is closed and therefore deadlines are pushed off - is a mystery. The advantage of such scheduling is of course that if things don't go as planned, there's time to fix them before business resumes and deadlines need to be met.

Let us hope that things go better for the Israel PTO than they did for the USPTO last week, which similarly scheduled computer systems maintenance for a workday (starting at 10 PM rather than midnight), and then had its systems down for most of the following workday - no PAIR, no EFS, no Patentcenter, and no way to pay fees. And no word on why they didn't schedule the work for early Saturday morning at the beginning of a long holiday weekend.

New Israel PTO Patent Electronic Filing System - Introductory Meeting

Last week the Israel PTO announced it would be holding a meeting at the ILPTO at 11 AM on Tuesday, September 5 to demonstrate how to use its new electronic filing system.

Amazingly, it didn't occur to anyone in the office that not all patent practitioners, paralegals and inventors live close to Jerusalem, or that there exist technologies for demonstrating such things remotely.

Today the ILPTO announced that, "In response to requests from the public, the teaching session on the new filing system...will be offered in a hybrid format". Presumably this means that people will be able to view the session remotely.  However, the office notes that "Nevertheless, we recommend that people come to the Patent Office in order to actively participate in the session".

If you wish to participate (remotely or in person), you'll need to send an email to [email protected] .  Presumably the session will be in Hebrew.

Neither announcement mentions when the new system will go live.

You Want To File an IDS at the Israel PTO? First File a Power of Attorney, Buddy

Here’s another one that I heard today from a colleague in Israel.

The issue (allowance) fee was paid in an Israel patent application for an application owned by a company.  Now an examination report has issued in a corresponding application elsewhere, that mentions some previously-uncited publications as background references.  By statute, the Israel PTO needs to be made aware of those references, even though (a) they’re meaningless and (b) the ILPTO isn’t going to act on them.

At present, the rules in Israel say that any company, or any practitioner representing someone else, must file using the Israel PTO’s electronic filing system. So simply sending the list of references to the ILPTO is not an option. And the practitioner who normally attends to these things on behalf of the company is out of the country, so the company asked someone else to submit these references. But the Israel electronic filing system won’t let him, since he’s not the listed representative associated with the company.

As I’ve blogged before, in the US, this would be a non-issue – submitting prior art references (or taking almost any other action in an application) is something any registered practitioner can do, even if there’s no power of attorney on record to that person.

But here in Israel? Oh, no, we can’t have that. No, in order for this practitioner to submit an IDS, even a meaningless IDS, there has to be a power of attorney on file to that practitioner.  That has to be submitted with a 240-or-so shekel fee.  And additionally, the address for service must be listed as the practitioner’s address for service.

Moreover, in the US, one can submit a POA along with other documents, in parallel. But in Israel? No parallel processing for you, young man. FIRST you have to submit the POA with a fee, and then, when the office gets around to processing that, you can submit the IDS. If you received notice of the foreign-cited references on the last day when you can submit an IDS, tough.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: why did the company not make provisions for when its usual patent counsel is on vacation? I don’t know. But the situation is as it is. And it’s ridiculous.

There are at least two ways my colleague could handle this, here I'll mention one of them: my colleague could submit a document under the heading “submission of power of attorney and change of address”, which the system will let him do, but rather than submitting a POA, he could just submit a cover letter that says, “Per its obligations under section 18 of the statute, the applicant would like to bring the following references to the attention of the Office, and since you won’t me file this under ‘Section 18 update’, I’m submitting it as a POA”. The system will still make him pay the 240 shekels to do so, but at least the document will be in the file.