The Language of Patents (Part I): Equipping Patent Applications for Pre-and Post-Grant Success

Patents that are expected to protect a company’s most valuable innovations must stake a claim to that innovation and be equipped to defend it. This is because being worthy of patent protection doesn’t guarantee that an application’s claims to an innovation will not be rejected and rights to that innovation jeopardized. A major reason for this is that an examiner’s interpretation of a claim drawn to an innovation that may be worthy of patent protection may cause them to determine that the subject matter as claimed is not patentably distinct from the prior art. Such an interpretation can block the patentability of the claim in the absence of evidence that the examiner’s interpretation of the claim is not reasonable. Structural weaknesses of the detailed description that may or may not be addressed by patent drafting orthodoxy can result in a lack of a capacity to successfully manage challenges presented by an examiner’s interpretations of subject matter set forth in claims. An unorganized capacity to respond to such rejection challenges often leaves the practitioner with very little alternative but to amend claims in a manner that narrows protection to less than what the applicant’s invention should have received.Read More