federal circuit upholds same day continuation applications

On June 21, 2016, the Federal Circuit kept the longstanding administrative construction of 35 USC 120 that permits the filing of a continuation application on the same day its parent application grants as a patent.  Immersion Corp. v. HTC Corp., No. 2015-1574 (Fed. Cir. Jun 21, 2016).  In this case, the district court held that the statute requires a continuation application to be filed before the parent application grants, even though the USPTO does not keep time-of-day filing records.  In reversing the lower court's decision, the Federal Circuit reasoned that same-day continuations have been approved by the USPTO for at least half a century and interpreted the statute as providing for such same-day filings based on longstanding agency interpretation.