Justifications for breaking diligence:
(a)    Legitimate justifications: Poverty and illness, regular employment, overworked patent attorney. Treat these cases as though lapse in diligence never occurred.
- Seybold: Poverty is a circumstance the court will consider but not a blanket excuse.
(C5P107).
(b)    Not legitimate: Doubts about value or feasibility or work on other inventions.
Griffith: (ch5p145) Stopped working on invention while waiting for particular grad student to matriculate and attempting to get outside funding as a validation step. Court does not see this as a valid reason for stopping work, Cornell took its chances by not funding the endeavor.
- Rule: An unexplained break in activity of merely 3 months is sufficient to destroy
diligence.
(c)    If after resuming you are second to reduce to practice, can’t backdate your priority to date of conception or even the date you resumed work. You lose, unless you have a legitimate reason in which case date of conception is preserved.