On August 27, 2025, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office quietly announced that it would be deprecating its current Patent Assignment Search and Assignments on the Web assignment search portals and replacing them with a new portal accessible from Assignment Center. The announcement states:
Starting on September 27, 2025, Assignment Search will be live, and the two legacy systems will cease to be available. This new, web-based application provides customers seeking patent and trademark assignment information with reliable, detailed results via a modernized interface. Customers can perform basic searches and refine their searches using the filtering options available in the "advanced search" field of the tool.
Just over a year ago, the USPTO informed the public that it had suffered a data breach in its assignment interface that appears when accessing a patent or application in Patent Center. In response, the USPTO disabled this option in Patent Center, thus requiring more effort for applicants to check or confirm the status of their assignments. But the overall inconsistency and unreliability of the current systems have been problematic.
Particularly, the situation can be summed up as follows. Some assignments can be viewed from Patent Center (despite what the USPTO alleges), but most patents and applications have the assignment tab grayed out. Many can be found using Patent Assignment Search. Sometimes Patent Assignment Search will not provide any results, even for an assignment that has been properly recorded. In those cases, Assignments on the Web might or might not provide a result. Both Patent Assignment Search and Assignments on the Web are periodically unresponsive, either never completing or returning no results at all. Also, neither will show the assignment statuses of unpublished applications, even to the attorney of record.
This means that when an applicant cannot locate an official record of an assignment by any of these means at the USPTO, they need to check whether they received a notice of recordation. If they did, the assignment is almost certainly recorded even if Patent Assignment Search and Assignments on the Web indicate otherwise.
Like many aspects of dealing with USPTO web-based systems that do not work as advertised, these inconsistencies cause excess delays and cost applicants money. In particular, trying to ascertain the status of a large patent portfolio can be very time consuming, whereas previously (when things were working properly via Patent Center) it was relatively straightforward. This is particularly problematic when an assignee is trying to use their IP assets as collateral for financing or needs to demonstrate ownership as part of a sale. If they do not have notices of recordation on hand, the assignment status of these assets may remain unclear.
While the USPTO's announcement of a replacement for these limited and undependable portals should be welcome, there is reason to be cautious due to the agency's recent track record.
Notably, the USPTO's rollout of Patent Center has been and continues to be plagued with persistent technical issues that have frustrated practitioners and increased the costs of routine filings. When Patent Center fully replaced legacy systems such as EFS-Web and PAIR last year, practitioners were subjected to bugs that disrupted even basic functions. These errors have been described as "totally unacceptable," and what were once were straightforward submissions now take longer, create uncertainty, and can jeopardize deadlines. The added time and expense ultimately fall on the most vulnerable applicants, particularly startups and smaller companies with limited budgets.
The USPTO's announcement implicitly acknowledges the obvious -- its current assignment portals are unreliable. Replacing them is welcome, but the agency's execution record in deploying new platforms is mixed at best. Without meaningful improvements in testing, responsiveness to practitioner feedback, and long-term maintenance, the new Assignment Search risks joining the growing list of USPTO systems that never quite work as intended. For now, the legal community should be cautious until the new system has proven itself under day-to-day use.
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