Episode 3

In Japan, after filing a patent application (Article 36 of the Patent Act) and requesting examination (Article 48-2 to 4 of the same Act), the rate of registration being granted at the first notification (the rate of registration being achieved immediately without notification of reasons for refusal) is 14.3% (January to December 2022) (https://www.jpo.go.jp/toppage/pph-portal-j/statistics.html). In other words, more than 85% of applications will receive a notice of reasons for refusal.
A notice of reasons for refusal (Article 50 of the Act) is a notification that the requirements of Article 29, Article 29-2, Article 36, etc. of the Act are not met. Of these, violations of Article 36 of the same law are due to incomplete descriptions and the incompetence of the filing agent. In other words, it is an embarrassing reason for rejection for the agent.
If the patent office with which your company does business frequently receives notices of reasons for refusal for violation of Article 36 of the same law, it should be determined that the patent office has low ability as an application agent.

Episode 2

Continuing from the first episode, I will write about how to tell the difference between a good and bad patent firm based on its website.
Even if you create a website, there is no point in leaving it as is, and it will only have negative effects. A website is a place for communication between information senders and people who come into contact with that information. Communication is not a one-way transmission of information, but a mutual exchange of information.
Even if a website creator wants to disseminate this kind of information, there is no guarantee that the people who view the website will receive it as intended. It is possible that the interpretation may be different from the website creator's intention. Therefore, it is necessary to update the website so that the thoughts of the website creator can be more appropriately conveyed based on the reactions of the people who view the website.
Although some patent offices have websites, they have not been updated for years. An office whose website has not been updated for more than a year is a poorly managed and sloppy office. Even if you request such a firm to file applications for industrial property rights (patents, utility models, designs, trademarks), there is a possibility that customer information and application data are not managed properly.
Intellectual property rights, including industrial property rights, are an effective means to increase the value of a company. For this reason, if a patent office that has requested an application for industrial property rights does not properly manage customer information and application data, the value of the company will be reduced as a result.

Episode 1

Once you start your own practice as a patent attorney and start doing everything yourself, you will be able to see the imperfections of other patent firms more clearly.
Therefore, we will write down the real image of a patent office that can be seen through the website.
Website domains include “.com”, “.jp”, “.co.jp”, etc.
“.com” is a domain that stands for “commercial”.
".jp" is a domain representing "japan".
“.co” in “.co.jp” is a subdomain that stands for “commercial”, and “.co.jp” is a domain that stands for a company registered in Japan.
The Patent Office is a patent attorney office whose main business is acting on behalf of applications related to industrial property rights (patents, utility models, designs, trademarks) to the Patent Office. It is inappropriate to use ".com" or ".co.jp" for the domain of the patent office's website.
In patent offices that use “.com” or “.co.jp” for their website domains, the director (representative patent attorney) is unfamiliar with IT and has hired ignorant and uneducated IT engineers to create the website. It can be understood that you are just throwing everything away. Even if you ask such a patent office to handle patent applications, especially those related to IT, it is unlikely that they will be able to provide high-quality application services.
In addition, some patent offices have websites that support multiple languages. When creating a website that supports multiple languages, place a subdirectory representing each language next to the domain and write each language code there. The language code is defined by ISO-3166, and the Japanese code is "ja", so Japanese websites created by organizations in Japan use ".jp/ja".
By the way, in addition to language codes, country codes for each country are defined in ISO-639. The country code for Japan is “JP”.
Some patent office websites confuse the language code and country code and list "jp" in the subdirectory of the Japanese website.
In the case of Japan, there is no problem because there is a one-to-one correspondence between language and country, but this is not the case in many countries in the world. For example, the United Kingdom and the United States are countries where English is the official language. The language code for English is “en”, the country code for Great Britain is “GB”, and the country code for America is “US”.
When creating a website that supports multiple languages, confusing the language code and country code shows that the creator is ignorant and uneducated, and the person who directed the creation is equally ignorant and uneducated. It shows that. In the case of a patent firm, the creator is the firm's system staff or a subcontractor, and the person giving instructions is the director or representative patent attorney. Even if you request such a patent office to handle your foreign applications, it is unlikely that they will be able to provide you with high-quality application services.