Five vendors to make patent process paperless

Computerworld - The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office yesterday signed partnership deals with five companies as part of its plan to make the patent application process completely paperless by 2004.
In its announcement, the Washington-based agency said that under the deals, the five companies will create their own road maps to eliminating paperwork in the patent application process.
The companies are Aspen Grove Inc. in Needham, Mass.; AutoDocs LLC in Falls Church, Va.; First to File Inc. in Menlo Park, Calif.; LegalStar in Williamsville, N.Y.; and LexisNexis Group in Dayton, Ohio.
Richard Maulsby, a spokesman for the patent office, said that all of the deals are "no-cost contracts" for the agency, with each of the vendors doing the development work for the electronic process at their own expense. The vendors will later be able to market the electronic patent filings as part of their service packages to individual inventors or corporations, he said. The fees haven't yet been established. It isn't a competition, he said, and each vendor will be able to market its service to U.S. Patent Office customers.
Some of the companies are further along than others in making the transition to electronic patent applications. Such applications are already being used but make up only a small part of the applications the agency receives each year.
The deals will help the agency with the plans it announced earlier this month (see story), including the goal of start-to-finish electronic-filing capabilities for patent applications by October 2004. The agency is also moving to electronic filing of all trademark applications by October 2003, as part of its 21st Century Strategic Plan to make the processes faster and more efficient for customers.
The agency also hopes to save as much as $500 million in costs by moving to an all-electronic filing process.
The partnerships with the five vendors will supplement the agency's existing Electronic Filing System.
Maulsby said the agency is following the electronic-filing model built by the Internal Revenue Service for the filing of tax returns as it proceeds with its modernization plans. "The hope is that you take the business expertise and the profit motive and they will come up with plans" that make electronic patent filing easier and more efficient, he said.