The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced on October 1, 2025, that after eleven years of operation, it is closing the Rocky Mountain Regional Outreach Office in Denver.
Established by the 2011 Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, the Denver regional office was opened along with three additional regional offices in Detroit, Dallas, and San Jose. No other regional office closures have been announced. The USPTO initiative for opening the regional offices was to better connect with patent filers and innovators around the country, hire more examiners to decrease patent application wait times, and improve the quality of patent examination. In recent years, the goal of the offices shifted to focusing on community outreach.
In an October 1, 2025 announcement, the USPTO cited high overhead costs and decreased employee numbers as the rationale for closing the Denver office. The announcement estimated the typical regional office requires more than $1 million of overheard expenses to operate, and said that Denver staff headcount had dropped to fewer than 10. In the announcement, USPTO leaders remained hopeful that community outreach can continue in the Rocky Mountain region, albeit, now remotely through virtual education and other programs.
Former USPTO Rocky Mountain Regional office director Russ Slifer, quoted in a recent Colorado Sun article, called this rationale misleading. “There are far more employees [than 10] with a duty station of Denver, including judges and patent examiners,” Slifer said in the article.
The Sun article also estimated that of the 354 patent examiners in the Rocky Mountain Region, 230 of them reside in Colorado.
“For the record, there were more than 10 of us,” said Molly Kocialski, regional director of the Denver office from 2016 until this past September, in a recent LinkedIn post. She remains concerned that “hundreds of people who have the Denver office as their reporting duty location” will be left without answers by the closure.
In the Sun article, “[the overhead costs are] pennies when you’re looking at the total billions of dollars of budget that the patent office has,” Justin Krieger, Kilpatrick Townsend’s Denver office managing partner said. He believes the value of the regional office “goes beyond direct dollars,” not only saving innovators the cost of a plane ticket to Washington D.C. to “have a seat at the table,” but also serving as a tremendous resource to local intellectual property students.
According to the USPTO budget for the 2026 fiscal year, the agency is projected to bring in about $5 billion in patent and trademark fees, which more than covers its operating expenses of $4.68 billion, equating to an estimated $300 million in surplus.
“We at Holzer Patel Drennan have appreciated the USPTO staff here in Denver over these last eleven years,” says firm founder Rick Holzer. “Educational conferences provided valuable insights, discussions with Patent judges improved our prosecution skills, and many of their programs helped our new-inventor clients navigate the world of patent prosecution.”