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Reporting Letters

Written by Howard Katzenberg

Reporting Letters turns an Office Action into a draft report to your client: what the Examiner raised, what the register said on the day the action issued, and a recommendation where one is warranted.

The drafter is at /reporting-letters. Your letter library is at /settings/letter-library.

This is different from the response drafter. A response is written to the USPTO; a reporting letter is written to your client, explaining what happened and what you suggest doing about it.

Who Can Use It

Reporting Letters is marked Early access and is limited to accounts on the early-access list. If you do not see it in your sidebar, it has not been enabled for your account.

How It Works

  1. Enter a serial number — 8 digits, for example 97750068

  2. Choose which Office Action — if the mark has more than one round, pick the one you are reporting on. The tool covers Office Actions issued since 2025; if none is available for that serial, the page tells you so rather than guessing

  3. Press Draft — the drafter works through three stages, each shown with an elapsed clock:

    • Reading the Office Action — every refusal and requirement, as the Examiner wrote it

    • Checking the register — cited marks, prior registrations and comparable terms, as of the action date

    • Writing the letter — merit on each issue, then the letter in your voice

  4. Review what it relied on — the issues the drafter read, and the merit it assigned each one, are shown beneath the letter

A first draft usually takes about two minutes. Keep the tab open while it runs.

What the Draft Is, and What It Is Not

Two limits the screen states plainly, and both matter before anything reaches a client:

  • It does not read the application’s current status. Every registration it cites is checked against the register as it stood on the action date, not today. If something has changed since, the letter will not know.

  • It is a draft. Read every citation and every date before sending.

Writing In Your Voice

With no letters of your own uploaded, drafts use a default letter style, and the page says so: “Using the default letter style. Add your letters to match your voice.”

Add your own letters at /settings/letter-library and the drafter writes in your voice instead. The library is a table with one row per letter, and it opens with the answer most people actually want: which legal issues your letters already cover, and which they do not — for example, well covered on likelihood-of-confusion refusals and disclaimers, nothing on specimen refusals. That summary doubles as a filter.

Two things worth knowing about the library:

  • Each letter has an on/off switch. The coverage summary counts only letters the drafter can actually see, so switching one off removes it from both.

  • Every issue tag shows its evidence on hover — the sentence from your letter that justifies the tag, so you can check why a letter was classified the way it was.

After the Draft

From the draft you can:

  • Edit it in place; your changes are kept with the draft

  • Revise it with instructions, which re-runs only the writing stage and usually takes about a minute

  • Download it as a Word file

  • Copy the text, or create a share link

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