Patent Office Orders Teleworking Examiners Back to the Office

Some teleworking patent examiners at the US Patent and Trademark Office have less than a week to return to agency offices in person full time under guidance circulated this week.

The directive came in an email from Commissioner for Patents Vaishali Udupa sent just after 4 p.m. Tuesday to employees in the agency’s “patents” business unit, a copy of which was reviewed by Bloomberg Law. That unit has around 10,000 teleworkers.

Notably excluded from the mandate—for now—are those covered by a union contract or disability accommodation, Udupa’s email said.

Those who are classified as “routine teleworkers” and already work some of their weekdays from USPTO offices were given until Feb. 10 to be back at their desks Mondays through Fridays, according to the email. Those designated to telework through a program for employees living within 50 miles of a USPTO facility and fully remote workers who are part of the agency’s Telework Enhancement Act Program were also directed to return to office in the email “on a rolling basis as office space is readied, beginning as soon as this week.”

Those last two categories accounted for 9,137 of the 9,977 teleworking employees in the patents business unit, according to a breakdown in a 2023 agency report.

Unionized employees “whose telework is the result of a collective bargaining agreement” and those who telework due to a disability “are not covered by this message,” Udupa said in the email.

That means the mandate would have the greatest immediate effect on non-union categories of workers, including supervisory patent examiners who review the work of junior examiners and sign off on decisions made in response to patent applications.

Finding office space for all the patent workers could prove challenging given the agency’s embrace of teleworking over the past quarter-century. Nearly 13,000 USPTO workers in total—96% the agency’s employees—work remotely, according to the 2023 report. Within the patents business unit, 5,320 employees were teleworking under the 50-mile program, 3,817 did so under the Telework Enhancement Act Program, while another 763 were classified as routine teleworkers.

Other business units also began preparations to comply with the administration’s return-to-work mandate this week, including one made up of non-union administrative patent judges and their support staffs. On a virtual call for Patent Trial and Appeal Board judges on Feb. 4, an attendee told Bloomberg Law that the group was given a Feb. 24 target date to return to offices.

A USPTO spokesman said the agency had no “comment or confirmation” of the email.

Two leading patent trade associations on Feb. 3 urged Congress to step in to protect the agency’s “highly successful telework model.” The American Intellectual Property Law Association and the Intellectual Property Owners Association released a joint letter predicting that strict adherence to the Trump administration’s return to in-person work “could reduce examiner productivity and retention” and “severely restrict the agency’s ability to address its growing workload.”

The associations noted that there’s currently a “backlog of unexamined patent applications” that has reached 826,000, and they warned the backlog already “threatens to delay the protection of groundbreaking technologies, from artificial intelligence to life-saving medical treatments.”

Howard Lutnick, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Commerce Department—which oversees the USPTO—pledged during his confirmation hearing last month to tackle the patent-application backlog, which he labeled as “unacceptable.”