The patent budget is defended at the abandonment review, not at the filing decision

Practice note, Burbage Law, PC, October 6, 2026

Most in-house programs have a filing committee and almost none have an abandonment committee, which is backwards, because the filing decision commits a small fraction of what a patent family will eventually cost. The rest is committed later, one decision at a time: the foreign filing decision at twelve months, the national phase decision at thirty months, the decision to answer each office action rather than let the application go, the issue fee and the continuation that goes with it, and the maintenance fees and foreign annuities that run for the life of the patent. In most programs those later decisions are made by default, by a docketing system that generates a reminder and a paralegal who pays the fee, so the budget fills with payments nobody chose to make on applications nobody has reread since they were filed. The programs that hold their budgets treat each of those dates as a decision with an owner, and the question asked at each one is the same: do the claims as they now stand read on something we ship, something a competitor ships, or something still on the roadmap. In two decades of prosecuting for companies from startups to Google and Toyota, the single change that did the most for a budget was reversing the default, so that at each date the application is abandoned unless someone states on the record why it should be paid for.