Part of the filing process is to do your homework in regard to prior art prior for any submitted patent. Otherwise you are spending a bunch of $$ when your patent will end up getting nixed several years down the road. That job relies on your patent attorneys to tell you if you are free to practice in your technology. I hope that they have good attorneys that offer them good and honest advise. 18 months after submission, the cat is out of the bag and the publication becomes viewable by all. Some recommend submission of the provisional patent which gives you one year from the original filing date so that you can have a date to look back upon and claim priority for your patent compared to someone else. Some even promote early publication so that they can talk about it openly because NDAs can be so problematic/cumbersome. The early publication also allows the company to say you had the ability to see this even earlier, so you cant claim you invented in in parallel to us. I speak from personal experience in this regard. Many pros/cons of each avenue.

BGD