Patent Office Chief Shares Timeline for Agency’s Tech Upgrades (1)

The Patent and Trademark Office has set in motion a nearly three-year plan to reset its existing technology infrastructure and update its legacy systems, the agency’s head said.

“Our systems are old and some of them haven’t been modernized in years, maybe decades,” PTO Director Andrei Iancu said May 2 at the quarterly meeting of the agency’s Patent Public Advisory Committee. “The status quo simply cannot stand.”

The PTO relies heavily on its information technology systems that support its electronic filing portal for patent and trademark applications and tools used by examiners to speed up application evaluations. But the U.S. ...