When to Use "Said" in Patent Claims

J. Douglas Miller at Small Business IP Protection and Managament has given his thoughts on the age-old question of just what is the "Proper Use of SAID in Patent Claims"

There are currently three different practices used in writing patent
claims. The first time an element or part is recited in a patent claim, it must
be preceded by the indefinite article “a” or “an” (although some exceptions
exist for “means” and plural recitations). For each repeated reference of an
element, one practice is to use “said” preceding the element and use “the” for
anything else. Alternatively, some practitioners precede everything with
“said” upon repetition thereof. A third, and somewhat more recent
practice, is to omit the use of “said”, and simply use “the” to precede
everything repeated.

I prefer to use "said" for only the first time that an element appears in any dependent claim, as a signal for the reader to look back to an earlier claim for the antecedent basis. Leave your comment below.