I sympathise with your mum to a certain extent,
the quality of some of the international patent reports produced by some of our patent examiners was not all that good. However I have seen reports from the US patent office that were utterly appalling and made the worst locally produced stuff look brilliant. We usually regard US international reports as nearly worthless (and so do their own patent examiners who routinely run the patent searches again and find new "art") and from what I see on-line so do European patent examiners, some or most of the time.

When this bullshit started a couple of years ago we were gathered together and given a lecture on how these reports should be written. I had never seen the bloke before. Turned out he had been there less than 30 months and he was telling 20 year staff how to do their job. Now if his recommendations had made sense it would not have been so bad. However the things he was telling us to do would have made the average four or five page report into a document of a dozen pages of barely readable guff and quadrupled the time needed to write it. It would only irritate the patent applicants and attorneys. This was pointed out in no uncertain terms at this gathering, I was going to do it but others beat me to it. They didn't call him a fuckwit to his face but that was the clear and wholly justified message.

Not a blind bit of notice was taken. So as far as I am concerned, I don't mind using frippery like block capitals here and there or spelling out "December" just in case some idiot thinks "Dec" means April, but I draw the line at stating the bleeding obvious about every possible permutation of the patent claims in words of one syllable to people who are usually far better qualified than I am. It's particularly true when it is obvious that the patent claims will be altered or dropped as a result of the report, however it is phrased.
(Redemption blamed it on the Bossa Nova since, Sat 29 May 2010, 14:55, Reply)