Executive Summary: Large companies obtain patents not only to exclude competitors, but also to influence commercial decisions long before litigation occurs. A strategically constructed portfolio can deter operating competitors through a form of mutually assured destruction, provide bargaining currency for cross-licenses, preserve future product options, control competitive design space, strengthen relationships with suppliers and partners, support standards participation, gen

Executive Summary: This article compares U.S. design-patent law after LKQ Corp. v. GM Global Technology Operations LLC with the European Union’s unitary design regime, highlighting the different perspectives of the U.S. “ordinary designer” and the EU “informed user.” Although LKQ replaced the rigid Rosen-Durling obviousness test with a more flexible framework, recent decisions—including Dynamite Marketing and Range of Motion—show that challengers must still identify an actual

Executive Summary: A patent application is legally evaluated through the lens of a person of ordinary skill in the art, but its practical success depends on a much broader audience: patent examiners, continuation counsel, foreign associates and national-phase examiners, judges, opposing counsel, juries, and licensing and business teams. This article argues that the solution is not to write different versions of the invention for different readers, but to develop one coherent

Executive Summary: This article compares the USPTO ex parte appeal process before the PTAB with the JPO appeal against an examiner’s decision of refusal, using each system as a teaching framework for practitioners trained in the other. Its central point is that the two systems are analogous but not interchangeable: a USPTO appeal is triggered by the “twice rejected” rule and proceeds through a record-centered, brief-driven sequence—Notice of Appeal, Appeal Brief, Examiner’s A

Executive Summary: The USPTO’s new pre-order paper procedure gives patent owners a narrow but potentially consequential opportunity to challenge an ex parte reexamination request before the Office orders reexamination, but the article emphasizes that this opportunity must be framed consistently with the low SNQ threshold: the patent owner need not, and should not, try to disprove unpatentability; rather, it should show that the request misidentifies the cited reference’s teac