Executive Summary: This article argues that examiner-level patent prosecution is better understood as a form of mediative advocacy than as the adversarial process for which lawyers are traditionally trained. Unlike litigation, prosecution involves no opposing claimant, the asserted legal right remains mutable, and both the examiner and applicant ultimately seek a correct determination of patentability, although they approach that objective from different institutional roles.

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: This article compares how the USPTO and EPO treat “secret prior art”—earlier-filed patent applications that were not public when a later application was filed but later acquire prior-art effect after publication. In the United States, AIA § 102(a)(2) treats qualifying U.S. patent documents, including certain PCT publications designating the United States, as prior art as of their effective filing dates if they name another inventor; such references may be u

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