The importance of SAOSIT

Those who file patent applications relying upon Article 4 of the Paris Convention should pay attention to the requirement that the second application needs to have its applicant be the same applicant or successor in title with respect to the applicant in the first application.  This gives rise to the initialism SAOSIT.  (It’s not an acronym — see this blog article.)

And there are some patent offices that take the position that the “cleanup” paperwork that brings about the “or successor in title” situation is paperwork that needs to have been executed chronologically prior to the filing of that second application.  I am told by practitioners in the UK and in EPO that this time relationship needs to be satisfied for either of those Offices.

One of the places where this comes up is with the filing of a provisional as discussed here.

Oh, yes, and if anybody wonders, I am the person who coined the initialism SAOSIT.  I think I coined it about six years ago.

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