There are five days left for anyone to suggest to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office where a good place for a new community outreach office should be located.
It’s got to be in the eight-state region, which includes Colorado, as well as Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming, according to the criteria.
It must partner with local community organizations, higher-education and research institutions and businesses. So, presumably, an airport must be nearby.
And there’s a focus on “emerging areas” like artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
The deadline to submit a comment is Friday, at 3 p.m. Denver time.
If Denver seems like a good place for the office, keep in mind that the USPTO announced it would permanently close the Rocky Mountain Regional Outreach Office in Denver on Oct. 1, the first day of the recent federal government shutdown. It said regional offices typically cost more than $1 million to operate and there were fewer than 10 employees who worked at the Denver office.
Some took issue with that characterization, including U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, a Denver Democrat. In a letter dated Oct. 31, DeGette asked USPTO’s new director John A. Squires for more information about the closure, including who made the decision.
She said some of the reasons for the closure were based on outdated information. The 10-employee figure came from December data before a return-to-office order. In fact, she wrote, “more than 300 teleworkers” are served by the Denver office and its closure “means that teleworkers’ second duty station is now Alexandria, Virginia, over 1,600 miles from Denver.”
The agency is also self-sufficient thanks to patent fees and doesn’t rely on federal appropriations. She said it was shocking to hear of its closure since the Rocky Mountain office “accounts for only .035 percent of USPTO’s annual budget, a drop in the bucket compared to the critical services the office provides.”
She asked for a response by Nov. 20. But as of Friday, a day later, DeGette’s office was still waiting for a response, according to a spokesperson.
Support for Denver metro
The Denver region was picked for a reason in 2012 to be one of the new regional offices mandated by the America Invents Act passed in 2011. It met all of the criteria and more, and also had a growing entrepreneurial community.
So, locals are working on their submissions. Dan Smith, president and advocacy committee chair of the National Association of Patent Practitioners and a patent agent in Boulder, said that his organization hopes to put a comment together but they are still debating it.
“The debate is just don’t move the original one,” Smith said. But they are still looking at other criteria and possible other locations in the Denver area, including Boulder.
Keeping it in the Denver area seems to be a priority, at least for those who’ve been used to having the office around.
Justin Krieger, a managing partner at the Denver office of Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton, is also planning to submit a suggestion. He’d visit the location because he also teaches a course on patent office litigation at the University of Denver law school. He’d take students to listen and watch hearings by the Patent Trials and Appeals Board judges, or PTAB.
Keeping it in metro Denver makes sense because “it lies at the center of one of the nation’s most vibrant and accessible innovation ecosystems that includes world-class research universities, federal laboratories, and an exceptionally active community of small inventors, startups, and individual entrepreneurs,” he said in an email.
There are already several research and higher-education institutions contributing to quantum technology and AI.
“Equally important,” he added, “Denver and Boulder have a long-standing culture of grassroots innovation with small businesses and independent inventors who rely heavily on direct USPTO engagement, education, and outreach. Locating the Rocky Mountain Regional Outreach Office in the Denver–Boulder area ensures that these small and often resource-constrained innovators have practical, local access to USPTO support, while leveraging Denver’s transportation infrastructure and centrality to serve the broader Rocky Mountain West.”
Meanwhile, the Denver office has reopened, confirmed a USPTO spokesperson. Just two people have returned to the office, which is located at the Byron G. Rogers Federal Building on Stout Street in downtown Denver.
But the office will permanently close in April, the spokesperson said in an email.
A month before it shut down, the Rocky Mountain Regional Director Molly Kocialski resigned after nearly a decade in the role. She helped build the office into a resource for inventors and prospective inventors in the region. But she felt like the job had changed. It had become more administrative than outreach. Tracking events was prioritized rather than visiting communities and talking to local entrepreneurs about the patent process, she said.
When she left in early September, she said the number of staff and patent examiners had grown to 354 in the Rocky Mountain region with about 230 in Colorado. Most were able to work remotely so they didn’t need to come to the office.
During the 43-day federal government shutdown, the patent office laid off 140 employees, Reuters reported. But as part of the budget deal to end the shutdown, federal workers that lost their jobs during the shutdown were supposed to see RIF notices rescinded.
Kocialski, reached Friday, said that 200 people across the agency were brought back but there’s still a lot of confusion. “The agency doesn’t have a plan about what people will be expected to accomplish. They brought people back but to what positions and to do what on behalf of the agency?”