Executive Summary: This article explains why responding to an Office Action in ex parte reexamination requires a different strategy than responding during ordinary patent prosecution. In ordinary prosecution, the applicant is generally trying to obtain commercially useful claim scope and may have procedural flexibility through amendment, RCE practice, or continuation practice. In reexamination, by contrast, the patent owner is defending issued rights—often in parallel with li

Executive Summary: This article argues that Subject Matter Eligibility Declarations (“SMEDs”) can be valuable prosecution tools for building a factual record in response to § 101 rejections, but only if they are used with discipline. A SMED should not ask an inventor or expert to declare that claims are patent eligible; rather, it should provide claim-tethered, corroborated technical facts showing how a person of ordinary skill in the art would understand the specification an

Executive Summary: This article explains that patent-term relief in Korea and the United States should be analyzed by the legal source of the lost time, not by the shared shorthand of “extension.” In the United States, patent term adjustment compensates for patent-office delay under 35 U.S.C. § 154, while patent term extension compensates for regulatory-review delay under 35 U.S.C. § 156. Korea has comparable but distinct regimes: Article 92-2 addresses delayed patent registr

Executive Summary: This article compares U.S. analogous-art doctrine with the EPO problem-solution approach through Sanofi-Aventis Deutschland GmbH v. Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc., where the Federal Circuit rejected an obviousness challenge because the petitioner linked a cross-field automotive reference to another prior-art reference rather than to the claimed drug-delivery invention. Under U.S. law, each relied-upon reference must be in the same field of endeavor as the claim

Executive Summary Patent prosecution is legal knowledge work, but it is also repeatable process work: new application filings, formalities, assignments, IDS submissions, Office communication processing, allowance, issuance, maintenance fees, foreign filing, and portfolio reporting all depend on accurate information, timely handoffs, reliable controls, and appropriate professional supervision. This white paper argues that patent operations can be improved by applying Lean Six