Michelle
Morgante

By Michelle Morgante
Regional Managing Editor, The Recorder

  What You Need to Know

• The USPTO sent emails terminating members of the patent and trademark advisory groups.
• Per their charter, the members serve at the pleasure of the commerce secretary.
• The former members said the nonpartisan committees served to improve innovation.

Two panels of citizen advisers to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office have been cleared of all members in an unprecedented action by the Trump administration’s new secretary of commerce.

The 18 members of the Patent Public Advisory Committee (PPAC) and Trademark Public Advisory Committee (TPAC) were informed by email this week that their positions were terminated.

The email message delivered on Tuesday thanked committee members for their service and noted that, by statute, they serve at the pleasure of the secretary of commerce.

“I regret to inform you that the secretary has decided to end all TPAC committee members appointments effective today,” said the message signed by acting Commissioner for Trademarks Dan Vavonese that was sent to TPAC members. The message was shared with Law.com.

The USPTO confirmed the action by Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, who was confirmed to the role by the Senate on Feb. 18.

In an email sent to Law.com on Friday, the USPTO said: “The Secretary of Commerce has decided to end all current PPAC/TPAC committee member appointments effective yesterday. Per statute, PPAC/TPAC members serve at the pleasure of the Secretary of Commerce.”

Thad Chaloemtiarana, a partner at Pattishall, McAuliffe, Newbury, Hilliard and Geraldson in Chicago, joined the TPAC in January and attended one meeting before having his term cut short. He said there was no reason given for the commerce secretary’s decision.

“I was surprised,” he said in an interview. “I’m not aware of this happening ever in the past, where they decided to remove all members.”

The committees were created through the 1999 American Inventors Protection Act to advise the USPTO director and review the policies, goals, performance, budget and user fees of the office with respect to patents and trademarks. Each committee has nine voting members “chosen so as to represent the interests of diverse users of the USPTO with respect to patents for the PPAC, and with respect to trademarks for the TPAC,” according to their charter.

The members serve three-year terms on a rotating schedule, with three new members appointed each year. All of the members who were dismissed this week had been appointed during the Biden administration, with the longest-serving beginning their terms in December 2022.

Deborah Gerhardt, a law professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law, said it was “an honor” to have served on the TPAC and had been looking forward to what would have been her third year.

“I was disappointed,” she said about receiving notice. “I felt like this was the year where I could give back the most, because I gained the most expertise over the past two years as a three-year appointment. It seemed a little odd to replace everybody.”

The challenge of having committees made of entirely new members will be a difficult one, she said.

“These new members will have to spend a lot of time just learning about the agency before they can provide meaningful insights into how things might be done better,” she said. “Because what we're able to do with the TPAC is take the information that we've learned working in the private sector and just share with the USPTO how they might do things differently.”

Douglas Masters, managing partner at Loeb & Loeb in Chicago, was appointed in December 2023 and had been vice chair of the trademark advisory committee.

“TPAC provides valuable input to the leaders of the trademark office regarding how their services are being used by the trademark community,” he said in an interview. During his term, the committee helped the trademark office with changes in its infrastructure, particularly in online services and applications and the office’s efforts to reduce the pendency of trademark applications.

The dismissal of the committee members comes before confirmation of the next USPTO director. John Squires, a Dilworth Paxson partner with experience in advanced technologies and intellectual property, was nominated on March 10 to lead the office. His nomination to become under secretary of commerce for intellectual property and director of the USPTO has been referred to the Committee on the Judiciary.

Squires did not immediately respond to a message seeking his comment Friday.

Chaloemtiarana, who has more than 25 years of experience practicing trademark law, is a past chair of the American Bar Association, Section of Intellectual Property Law and is currently vice chair of its nominating committee.

He had been looking forward to working on the committee and collaborating with the other TPAC members, describing them as “a really, really diverse and wide group of very experienced practitioners.”

“I was looking forward, as well, to hopefully providing some feedback on ideas that the trademark office has to reduce pendency, to reduce fraud on the trademark office, which are both two challenges I know they’ve been focusing on a great deal over the last several years.”

His nomination came in response to a public notice posted last summer. Throughout the application and selection process, he said, there were no questions about his political affiliation or voting record.

“To my knowledge, it’s only ever been a nonpartisan committee and group,” he said. “I was never asked any questions about, for example, party affiliation or anything of that nature. It's not relevant, in my view, at least for TPAC.”

Gerhardt said the apparent injection of political division “in a place where it makes no sense” was “the saddest thing about it.”

“This is not a partisan committee,” she said. “There were people who were Democrats, people who are Republicans, people who are independent, but what we all had in common is we were all experts, and we all represented different stakeholders who care about innovation.”

The trademark office, in particular, serves a range of business leaders, particularly low-wealth entrepreneurs whose trademarks may be their only piece of intellectual property.

The members of the advisory committee “were out there on the front lines, really trying to help people navigate the innovation space and protect their intellectual property by using USPTO resources,” she said. “It's really not very political. I think people across the political spectrum believe in supporting innovation and supporting business and competition.”

Law.com also reached out to the former members of the patent advisory committee for comment. None responded before publication.