The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced today that it has chosen the Terminal Annex Building in downtown Dallas as the site for its new regional satellite office. The building is located at 207 S. Houston Street on the southern edge of Dealey Plaza.
The USPTO announced in July that it had chosen Dallas as the site for a new satellite office program created as part of a mandate by the America Invents Act of 2011, which required the USPTO to establish at least three regional satellite locations by September 2014 as part of a larger effort to modernize the U.S. patent system.
The Dallas satellite office, along with new satellite offices in Denver, Silicon Valley and Detroit, are designed to reduce the backlog of patent applications and allow entrepreneurs and patent attorneys better access to patent examiners and to the USPTO’s comprehensive search databases. The opening date of the Dallas office has not yet been announced.
“The Dallas-Fort Worth area is exceedingly rich in engineering talent, patent applicants, and patent grants, and boasts an above average population of potential Veteran employees. This office location positions us well to serve the broad innovation community throughout the Central time zone and the South,” writes David Kappos, undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property and director of the USPTO, in a press release.
Max Cicarelli, a partner in Dallas’ Thompson & Knight who is immediate past chairman of the Intellectual Property Section of the Dallas Bar Association, loves that the new office will be in downtown Dallas.
“Downtown is working on revitalizing itself. It’s great for downtown Dallas and for Texas in general,” Cicarelli says. “This is part of the PTOs and Kappos’ effort to reduce caseload by bringing in more examiners. And additionally it’s nice that we can have interviews here locally instead of in Washington. That’s a big help, as well.”
--- John Council
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