As I stated before, I don't know their whole strategy or the timing of the applications, but here is how the publication process works.
A U.S. patent application is published 18 months after the first filing date. If you want to take advantage of the provisional application filing date, you have to file the non-provisional and the foreign applications within one year. So the application won't publish until at least 6 months after you filed the foreign application. And you only have 45 days to file your request for publication after you file the foreign application. So at the latest, the publication request would have to be filed 13.5 months after the provisional filing date, which is still prior to the 18 month publication date.
If they decide to forego the provisional filing date, and rely on the filing date of their non-provisional application (which might be OK if the non-provisional contains mostly new material that was not in the provisional, or they feel comfortable that nobody else is working on this technology so the earlier priority date is not a concern), then they have 12 months from the non-provisional filing date to file the foreign application and 13.5 months to file the publication request.
If they decide not to claim priority as to any prior application, then they can file the foreign applications at any time. If they followed such a strategy, however, I'd be very concerned that competitors or other researchers would file something in the meantime, eliminating LWLG's advantage of the earlier filing dates.
I guess we will see how it plays out. . |