Are divisional and continuation applications worth the money?
Your question might be better put: Are they necessary? First, let me quickly review what these specialty applications are all about. Once you file your RPA, you establish your filing date. (See previous FAQ.) Your filing date might be the actual day the RPA was filed, or it might be up to a year earlier if a PPA was filed first. But the point here is that the filing date becomes fixed once the PTO accepts your RPA. This has the potential of being a very important date, and it applies to all of the material disclosed and claimed in your RPA. Not too infrequently, the examination process gets messy. Some patent professionals would say that the examination process always gets messy. For instance, the examiner may take the position that you really have two inventions there, and he forces you to choose only one for examination. Or the examiner may refuse to allow claims that you feel are good claims. More often than not, you get to the end of the examination process and you don’t have every
