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Patent Pending: How to Get an Interview With the PTO Chief

Posted Nov 17, 2009, 02:16 pm CST
By Edward A. Adams

David Kappos, former vice president and assistant general counsel for intellectual property at IBM, was hired as the director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to flush the bottleneck of patent applications. It takes more than 20 months for the agency to take its first action on a patent application; his goal is to cut that time in half.

That’s a story we thought America’s lawyers would want to read, so we sent senior writer Terry Carter to find out how Kappos is doing. There’s only one problem: There’s a second bottleneck—this one in Kappos’ press office.

Carter left a message with a staffer at the PTO’s media relations department. He didn’t hear back. A few… Continue reading...



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