McCabe Ali’s Emil J Ali notes that a period of leadership flux at the USPTO hasplaced unusual scrutiny on the OED, with its next director poised to influenceeverything from practitioner admissions to how the agency responds to mountingconcerns over fraud, sanctions and proportionality in attorney discipline.

Since the beginning of 2025, the USPTO’s OED has been without a permanentdirector, with former OED Director Will Covey first being designated as the actingdeputy director of the USPTO, and now being formally named the USPTO’s CCO. InOctober 2025, the USPTO opened its recruitment for a new OED director, a role that stands to radically shape practitioner admissions, ethics enforcement, and disciplinary outcomes for years to come.

Link: USPTO attorney discipline enforcement: a look ahead

This work presents the ethical and legal risks when attorneys step outside of their comfort zones to engage in a generally unfamiliar area of law–a practice known as “dabbling.”

Publication: The Agent – An AIPLA Patent Agents Committee Publication

Article: “Stay In Your Lane: Patent Agents Must Respect Limited License Rights” by Michael E. McCabe, Jr.

The article addresses the ethical restrictions on Patent Agents’ right to practice outside of patent law before the USPTO.

This article first appeared under a different title in September 2017 in IPethics & INsights.

The article is now being republished as the second half of a two-part series on PTO ethics in Michigan’s IPLS.

The IPLS article addresses the history of USPTO ethical issues and recent decisions that patent firms and patent practitioners who do business with clients through a “foreign associate” or other type of client intermediaries or liaisons may confront.

The IPLS article addresses the USPTO ethical issues that face patent firms and patent practitioners who do business with clients through a “foreign associate” or other type of client intermediaries or liaisons.  The Patent Office recently published ethical guidance on this issue that could impact the way in which firms communicate with such client middlemen.  The article discusses the evolution of USPTO ethics precedent in the context of the IP lawyer-intermediary-client relationship, including the ethics issues that arise when a USPTO practitioner accepts instructions and legal fees from a non-USPTO practitioner intermediary; conflicts of interest and whether those must be disclosed to the client; fee-splitting with the middleman (and is it ethical); aiding the unauthorized practice of law; and other duties set forth in the USPTO’s Rules of Professional Conduct.