
Federal patent appeal paralegals had no work, so they surfed the Internet - ilamont
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2014/07/31/federal-paralegals-had-no-work-so-they-surfed-the-internet/?hpid=z5
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wtracy
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
Shhhhh on the facts and logic, WaPo is getting its "gubmint waste" Two Minutes
Hate on. ;)

~~~
MadManE
There 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.

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riskable
> But the inspector general found that for paralegals in the appeals office,
> working from home was a green light to abuse the privilege by doing laundry,
> washing dishes, reading books and a host of other personal activities.

Am I the only one that thinks this is not "abusing the privilege" of working
from home? If you don't have any work to do _who cares_ WTF you're doing with
all that free time?

If the paralegals were so efficient at getting their work done that they had
about 8 hours a day to fool around then clearly we have some _awesome_
paralegals! Bonuses all around!

I work from home and when I need to do laundry I do it. If I need to wash
dishes I wash them. My wireless headset is apparently a superpower.

I'll even admit that I've read books while on the clock! They were technical
(digital) books related to my work, of course, but if I'm expected to know
something how else am I going to learn it if the company isn't providing
training?

I've even been known to watch Youtube videos on my personal laptop while on
the clock! Just the other day I watched a video about some of the new features
in RHEL 7. Oh the abuse, it never ends!

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lotsofmangos
_Soon after the appeals board brought on additional legal support staff to
address a deluge of challenges to decisions by patent examiners, the Patent
and Trademark Office imposed a hiring freeze that halted hires of judges
needed to handle the appeals._

Not only are there fees paid to process those appeals, but the USPTO will have
made extra revenue by being able to charge fees to patent holders, some of
whom would otherwise not have patents for fees to be charged on, should these
appeals have been heard.

All in all, they seem to have done rather well out of this hiring freeze,
though I am sure they have done so with the utmost propriety and scuppering
the appeals process has been nothing more than a simple oversight, of course.

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pacaro
This reminds me of Frank Herbert's “Bureau of Sabotage” [1] -- which seems a
little like the idea of applying a chaos monkey to the workings of government

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Sabotage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Sabotage)

~~~
lotsofmangos
I love their reason for not imposing term limits on their leaders.

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mpnordland
So the paralegals had nothing to do, but still had to put in the hours? I need
this job. I am a professional web surfer with 8 years of experience. I think I
could really contribute to the effort.

~~~
Nursie
I've had this job. I was working for a team based in another country,
communications were poor (on both sides I'll admit) and it turned out later
the company was in the process of going down the pan anyway.

After a while you stop asking if there's anything you need to be doing. After
a while longer you start to feel paranoid that surely someone, somewhere is
going to figure out they're paying you to sit at home, sleep late and scratch
your butt...

~~~
Squarel
I have also had this job, the contract that comprised 90% of my work was lost,
and the company didn't want me to leave.

Surfing the internet at work gets boring very fast though when it is all you
have to do. I made it through 8 months before leaving for somewhere else.

