Jeffrey Snow Discusses Benefits of Continuation Patent Applications with Law360
Partner Jeffrey Snow, a member of Pryor Cashman’s Intellectual Property, Litigation, and Digital Media Groups, spoke to Law360 for its March 18, 2016 article, “4 Times to File a Continuation Patent Application.”
Law360 reports that when inventors are looking to protect an innovation, a standard patent application may not be enough. Continuation applications help to fortify their claims and prevent competitors from designing around their invention.
In addition, if a patent owner is currently bringing an infringement suit or its patents are being challenged in a post-grant proceeding at the patent office, it can be helpful to have a pending continuation application so that related claims can be modified based on what arises in those contentious proceedings.
Snow told Law360: “It’s useful to have a continuation application to be able to come up with claims of different scope and to either capture what the accused product is or avoid prior art references that are discovered in the course of litigation. If related claims of similar scope are further examined by the patent office and equally found to be patentable, that’s further indication of the strength of the patent in litigation.”
