Posts Tagged: "Patent Trial and Appeal Board"

At the end of July, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) hosted a press conference to discuss ongoing progress with patent trials which have been or are being conducted under the terms of the America Invents Act (AIA). Scott Boalick, Acting Vice Chief Judge of the PTAB and head of the PTAB’s Trial Section, answered questions from the audience on various aspects of the AIA trials, as well as offer questions for public comments being sought by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in its attempts to determine how and if the AIA patent proceedings can be improved.

Patent owners must modify their strategies during prosecution to make their patents and portfolios less susceptible to post grant challenges. This strategy must take into account the cost of filing a petition by a challenger. Patent owners must obtain enough claims and enough patents to make it extremely expensive for a challenger to go down the path toward an administrative patent trial where the deck is stacked against the patentee. This will require patent owners to obtain patent claims with numerous dependent claims that cover as many variations as possible, but also to ensure that the dependent claims build on one another little by little so as to create a claim set that refers back to as many previous claims as possible. Such a claim mosaic will raise the filing fee that must be paid to institute a post grant challenge.

Knowing when to give up on a patent application is one of the most critical questions facing for any patent applicant… When faced with the decision regarding whether to file an RCE or file an Appeal, the desire to not give up and to hopefully obtain a patent can easily lead any application to elect to the file a Request for Continued Examination (RCE). This is true for the cost reasons already stated, but also because filing an RCE you will undoubtedly get treatment much faster than going on the appeal track, and there is always hope that additional time working with the patent examiner will yield patentable claims. Of course, sometimes filing that next RCE is going almost certainly accomplish nothing.

What seems to be happening is that the PTAB is literally applying KSR v. Teleflex in a way that many initially feared it would be applied, but in a way it has never been interpreted by the Federal Circuit. Under a literal reading of KSR nothing is patent eligible… If you are a defendant in a patent infringement litigation and you haven’t filed an inter partes review, what are you waiting for? The Patent Office giveth with the examiners allowance and taketh away with a PTAB decision. As long as the PTAB is killing patents can you blame defendants and their lawyers? It would be practically malpractice for a defense attorney in a patent infringement case to fail to recommend seriously considering inter partes review.

When a patent is challenged by an IPR the challenge must be taken very seriously. Patent Office statistics for FY 2013 and FY 2014 through January 31, 2014, show that there have been a total of 361 decisions on IPR petitions, with 288 trials instituted. There have been 11 cases that have been joined and only 62 petitions denied, which corresponds with an 82.8% IPR petition grant rate. Having said this, the IPR grant rate during FY 2013 was 87.2%, while so far during FY 2014 the IPR grate rate has been 77.2%. This drop in IPR granting rate, while statistically relevant, should not lull patent owners into a false sense of security.

A goal of nearly every defendant is to lower the total cost of resolution of any legal issue. As counsel for the defendant, you have to weigh the settlement and licensing costs of a patent dispute against the total defense cost and how long it takes to resolve the dispute with certainty. Today, CBM, IPR, and PGR are the lowest possible cost options. Speed is one of the biggest benefits. The statute requires that a PGC proceeding must be completed in 12 months after institution, and in rare cases this extends to 18 months if the PTAB exercises a good cause exception. APJs are motivated to stay on deadline.

Kappos explained that the PTAB has started and will continue, in at least some cases, to issue shorter per curiam decisions, which will allow them to decide more cases and move through the backlog. Co-Chair of the program, Rob Sterne, asked Kappos whether this would present problems for those who might want to appeal to the Federal Circuit. Given the standards applied by the Federal Circuit will it be possible for an applicant ever be able to satisfy the standards? Kappos acknowledged that is a concern and why we will see hundreds of shorter per curiam decisions rather than thousands. Kappos explained that the USPTO wants these types of decisions issued only when the record is extremely clear, making a detailed decision of the Board less necessary.