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tl;dr: There were too many paralegals relative to the number of judges in the department. The paralegals had no authority to work on cases that hadn't been view
by wtracy 12y ago
tl;dr: There were too many paralegals relative to the number of judges in the department. The paralegals had no authority to work on cases that hadn't been viewed by a judge.
There was in fact a vast backlog of work, but the bottleneck was insufficient judges, not support staff.
- al2o3cr 12y agoShhhhh on the facts and logic, WaPo is getting its "gubmint waste" Two Minutes Hate on. ;)
- MadManE 12y agoThere is obviously a huge amount of waste going on, whether it's because of the judges or the paralegals. This report just got the source wrong.
- pmorici 12y agoThe angle the story takes is a little perplexing. They focus a lot on the fact that worker bee employees used their vast amounts of unoccupied time at work to conduct personal business. The real story here is that the patent office management was incompetent in their management duties not that there is some vast conspiracy by paralegals to defraud tax payers.