Dubner Comments on Filing System Outage at USPTO

Partner Michael Dubner was quoted in a Law360 article, “Prolonged Outage Sparks Concern About USPTO’s Aging Tech,” about the repercussions of a weeklong outage in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s online patent filing database.

Dubner, who has been practicing patent law for 19 years, said the outage forced patent attorneys to go back in time 10 years. “It’s a wake-up call about how things operated in the old days,” he said.

The outage also caused many attorneys to resort to the use of the postal service or fax machines, Dubner said. “A lot of younger attorneys who haven’t been practicing that long had never done that before,” he said.