Continuation Drafter
Tier C: effective filing date and the AIA transition
4 authorities. Each is quoted from its primary source and checked against a cached copy.
Under the AIA, a reference's provisional counts without a supported claim
The Board held, precedentially, that for prior art under the AIA a reference patent gets its provisional's filing date for whatever subject matter the provisional actually describes, with no need to show that any claim of the reference is entitled to that date.
One supported claim does not carry the whole disclosure back
The Federal Circuit held that a pre-AIA prior-art publication does not get its provisional's filing date for everything it teaches merely because one of its claims is supported by that provisional; the passage relied on in the rejection must be supported too.
Which regime your family is in decides which proceedings can reach it
The Federal Circuit held that patents whose effective filing dates all fall after March 16, 2013 are governed exclusively by the first-inventor-to-file regime and cannot be placed in an interference, reversing a Board decision that had cancelled such claims.
Lose the priority date, gain a post-grant review
The Federal Circuit affirmed a finding that the claimed formulation was not described in the application Purdue claimed priority to, which moved the patent's effective filing date past March 16, 2013 and made it eligible for post-grant review, and separately held that the Board keeps authority to decide after missing its statutory deadline.