Executive Summary: U.S. continuation practice is a uniquely powerful portfolio-management tool because it allows applicants to keep a patent family pending and pursue additional same-disclosure claim sets as markets, competitors, prior art, licensing needs, and litigation positions evolve. By contrast, Europe, China, Korea, and Japan offer important but more constrained follow-on mechanisms—principally divisionals, Korea’s narrower split/separate application procedure, and po

Executive Summary: For inventions developed in or across the United States and China, the first patent filing decision should begin with a territorial invention-location analysis, not with inventor nationality, corporate headquarters, or preferred filing venue. The United States generally requires a foreign filing license before filing abroad for an invention made in the United States, unless a U.S. filing has been pending for at least six months without a secrecy order or an

Executive Summary: Examiner interviews are a valuable prosecution tool, but their strategic significance varies sharply by jurisdiction. The central question is not simply whether an examiner will communicate with the applicant, but whether that communication carries procedural consequence, decisional authority, file-history effect, or merely informs the next formal filing. At the USPTO, interviews are routine and often powerful, but they must be recorded and may create prose

Introduction The easiest comparative mistake is to say that U.S. “written description” and Chinese “support by the description” are the same doctrine under different names. They are not. They respond to a similar overclaiming problem, but they operate through different statutory provisions, different institutional settings, and different vocabularies. In the United States, the central doctrine is the written-description requirement of 35 U.S.C. § 112(a). It asks whether the s