SCOTUS Denies Hyatt Petition on Prosecution Laches, Among Other Patent Denials

On the same day it granted a trademark petition, the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in a number of patent cases as its term nears an end, including the closely-watched case of Hyatt v. Squires, which challenged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s (CAFC’s) approach to the doctrine of prosecution laches.

In addition to the Hyatt case, the Court also denied cert today in Finesse Wireless LLC v. AT&T Mobility LLC, et. al.; Polar Electro Oy v. Firstbeat Technologies Oy; and Ortiz & Assoc. Consulting, LLC v. Vizio, Inc.

Gilbert Hyatt filed his petition in March of this year, asking the Justices to answer the question, “Whether the PTO may invoke the equitable doctrine of ‘prosecution laches’ to deny a patent to an applicant who has complied with all the Patent Act’s timeliness provisions.”

Hyatt argued that the Supreme Court has ruled in both Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (2014) and SCA Hygiene Products Aktiebolag v. First Quality Baby Products (2017) that laches does not exist when there is a statutorily prescribed timeframe to act. In Hyatt’s case, he argued, there are both statutes and rules that give applicants a defined time within which to act.

But Squires countered in May that Hyatt’s patent applications, filed during the period known as the “GATT Bubble”—which refers to the short time before patent term was changed to run from the date of issuance to the date of filing, as per the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property at the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT)—are “highly unusual” and accused Hyatt of bulk-filing applications, including “numerous duplicate” claims that are “extraordinarily lengthy and complex.” Squires’ brief claimed these applications have posed “‘unique’ and ‘extreme’ challenges for the USPTO,” and that Hyatt’s prosecution conduct “created a perfect storm that overwhelmed the PTO” and “all but guaranteed indefinite prosecution delay.”

IPWatchdog Founder and CEO Gene Quinn has written extensively on the Hyatt case and said that today’s denial “will be huge in the years to come” but is unfortunately “consistent with the Supreme Court approach to undercut patents at every level.”

Quinn continued: “With patents presumed unenforceable after six years of prosecution, and with hundreds of cases in the pipeline arguing that rule applies equally to post-GATT patents, prosecution laches will become the new killing field for patents.”

Jury or JMOL?

In Finesse Wireless LLC v. AT&T Mobility LLC, et. al, petitioner Finesse Wireless challenged a September 2025 decision of the CAFC reversing a district court’s denial of judgment as a matter of law (JMOL) of non-infringement and vacating a damages award in favor of Finesse. The CAFC said there was a lack of substantial evidence to support the jury’s verdicts finding AT&T Mobility and Nokia (AT&T) infringed two of Finesse’s radio signal interference mitigation patents.

In its petition for certiorari, Finesse asked the Supreme Court to consider the question “Whether a purported inconsistency in the testimony of an expert witness is an issue of credibility for the jury to resolve, as every regional circuit holds, or whether it instead supplies a basis for judgment as a matter of law, as the Federal Circuit held below and routinely holds in other cases.”

Eligibility

Polar Electro Oy brought its petition following a Rule 36 decision affirming the district court’s grant of summary judgment that Polar’s U.S. Patent No. 6,537,227 was patent ineligible under 5 U.S.C. § 101. Polar argued that the district court created “its own invalidity argument – including independently finding evidence, assembling rationales, and supplying evidentiary showings the movant did not provide” as well as challenging the eligibility finding itself and “the judicially created exceptions to 35 U.S.C. § 101 for abstract ideas, laws of nature, and natural phenomena” overall as constituting “impermissible judicial legislation that this Court should overrule and replace with the statute Congress actually wrote.”

Patent Marking and Exceptionality

Finally, in Ortiz & Associates v. Vizio, the CAFC in December 2025 affirmed a district court ruling affirming Vizio’s motion to dismiss Ortiz’s complaint for failure to comply with the patent marking statute as well as its grant of Vizio’s motion for attorney’s fees and finding that the case was exceptional under 35 U.S.C. § 285. Ortiz petitioned the Supreme Court, asking it to take up three questions: 1) whether a non-practicing patent owner has an obligation to ensure unrelated third-party products are marked; 2) whether the CAFC properly found the case exceptional; and 3) whether the First Amendment and the Supreme Court’s “sham-litigation doctrine impose a categorical prohibition on courts using settlement offers…as evidence supporting fee-shifting under 35 U.S.C. § 285, absent a finding that the underlying litigation is both objectively baseless and subjectively brought in bad faith…”