Bulk USPTO Form Field Population
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AppColl allows you to create form-filled USPTO forms for a matter; you can also create form-filled copies of such forms for multiple matters relatively easily from the Matters module. It would, however, be great if one could (for at least certain forms), give the user the option to specify how fields in that form that are NOT fillable from AppColl data are to be filled in.
For example, the AIA/122, AIA/123, AIA/83, and SB/123 forms (and there may be others) all relate to changing the address for a patent or application. Take the AIA/123 form, which is used to switch the correspondence/maintenance fee notice address--you need to provide either (a) a customer number that has the new address or (b) separately specify the name/address/telephone/email of the new addressee. It would be really great if AppColl gave you the chance to enter data for the fields in (b) prior to generating the PDFs, and then populated those fields in the generated PDF with that data.
For example, we recently had to transfer files back to a client (with no successor counsel arranged) and file change of correspondence address forms for 30 different patents. All of them had the information in (b) specified to be the same, and we had to copy-paste that info (which involved copying the data for 8 fields into all 30 forms--240 copy-pastes!) to finish the forms. It would have been a huge time-saver if we could have supplied that info up-front and had AppColl populate it when it populated the matter-specific data.
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Thank you Christian for the suggestion. We will pass this on to engineering for consideration. Keep the ideas coming.
- AppColl Support
