Before the USPTO was subject to a hiring freeze, it assumed it would onboard 400 new examiners between fiscal year 2025 and fiscal year 2026, and still predicted an increase in the backlog of unexamined patent applications....more
To wrap up 2019 and usher in 2020 for practitioners who handle Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) matters, Foley partners Jeanne Gills, Steve Maebius, and George Quillin discussed 2019’s major developments in a webinar on...more
1/23/2020
/ America Invents Act ,
Constitutional Challenges ,
Covered Business Method Proceedings ,
Final Written Decisions ,
Inter Partes Review (IPR) Proceeding ,
Patent Infringement ,
Patent Litigation ,
Patent Trial and Appeal Board ,
Patent-Eligible Subject Matter ,
Patents ,
Post-Grant Review ,
PTAB Precedential Opinion Panel (POP) ,
Real Party in Interest ,
USPTO
One area of estoppel arising from an unsuccessful AIA petition that remains poorly understood relates to prior art that is described both in a printed publication or patent and also was in use by others, such as to create...more
The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is poised to decide a case which may create new estoppel concerns for AIA petitioners under 35 USC § 315(e)(2). The appeal resulted from a Hatch-Waxman litigation in BTG v. Amneal,...more
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“PTAB”) issued its initial Trial Practice Guide in August 2012, shortly before America Invents Act (“AIA”) post-grant proceedings became available. That Guide had not been supplemented or...more
On June 13, 2018, Sen. Hatch (R-Utah) introduced an amendment that would require generic ANDA filers to choose between litigating validity in Hatch-Waxman district court litigation or an AIA challenge (IPR or PGR), and on...more
6/18/2018
/ Abbreviated New Drug Application (ANDA) ,
America Invents Act ,
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ,
Generic Drugs ,
Hatch-Waxman ,
Intellectual Property Protection ,
Patent Litigation ,
Patents ,
Pharmaceutical Industry ,
Pharmaceutical Patents ,
Prescription Drugs ,
Proposed Legislation ,
Tribal Governments
In Mylan v. Allergan (IPR2016-00127, Paper No. 73), the PTAB granted a rare request for discovery filed be Petitioner in response to summaries of data presented in a Patent Owner Response used to rebut obviousness. In...more
In a case that appears to be a case of first impression, the PTAB found in its decision denying institution in IPR2016-00781 that a final written decision in an earlier IPR created estoppel under 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(1),...more
On July 25, 2016, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) held in In re Magnum Oil Tools International (Newman, O’Malley & Chen) that the burden of production to show unobviousness does not shift to a patent owner...more
8/1/2016
/ Burden of Proof ,
Burden-Shifting ,
CAFC ,
Corporate Counsel ,
Cuozzo Speed Technologies v Lee ,
Inter Partes Review (IPR) Proceeding ,
Obviousness ,
Patent Litigation ,
Patent Trial and Appeal Board ,
Patents ,
Petition For Rehearing ,
Prior Art ,
USPTO
We have reviewed a sub-group of 111 IPRs filed by generic drug companies against pharmaceutical patents to assess outcomes and trends. While our survey was not intended to capture every IPR filed by a generic drug company, it...more
A common deficiency highlighted in recent PTAB decisions denying institution of an IPR petition is that an expert declaration offers only “conclusory” statements in relation to one or more key aspects of the alleged ground of...more
On May 2, 2016, the amendments to the Rules of Practice for Trials Before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board go into effect, and apply “to all AIA petitions filed on or after the effective date and to any ongoing AIA...more
4/6/2016
/ America Invents Act ,
Broadest Reasonable Interpretation Standard ,
Claim Construction ,
Covered Business Method Proceedings ,
Duty of Candor ,
Expert Testimony ,
Final Rules ,
Genuine Issue of Material Fact ,
Inter Partes Review (IPR) Proceeding ,
Patent Litigation ,
Patent Owner Preliminary Response ,
Patent Trial and Appeal Board ,
Post-Grant Review ,
USPTO
On March 31, 2016, the USPTO released its long-awaited package of rules for AIA post-grant proceedings. The final rules largely track the proposed rules (see “USPTO Proposes Extensive Changes to AIA Post-Grant Proceedings” to...more
An obvious but sometimes overlooked item when conducting patent due diligence is to check for PTAB proceedings (CBM, IPR, or PGR). Although the Patent Application Information Retrieval System (PAIR) does show whether patents...more
Kyle Bass has filed numerous prior IPR petitions against pharmaceutical patents, some of which have been denied due to use of prior art references that were not sufficiently proven to be “publicly accessible” (see “Clinical...more
On March 7, 2016, the Federal Circuit issued a temporary stay to permit briefing by the parties on the question of whether the PTAB properly ruled that Apple could use the joinder process in Mangrove Capital’s IPR against...more
In IPR2014-00614, Microsoft filed a petition for IPR against US Patent No. 7,418,504 (“the ‘504 patent) owned by VirnetX, which was instituted based upon anticipation grounds over Kiuchi (see institution decision). This IPR...more
On February 11, 2016, in Nike v. Adidas (Fed. Cir. 2016), the Federal Circuit partially relaxed the hurdle for a patent owner to amend claims during an IPR or other AIA proceeding. This follows the PTAB’s own earlier partial...more
A Texas jury today raised the stakes even higher in a race involving parallel proceedings between the PTAB and Texas district court when it found that Apple infringed the VirnetX patents and awarded to VirnetX $625.6M in...more
In Redline Detection v. Star Envirotech, the Federal Circuit confirmed that the PTAB can decline to consider timely filed “supplemental” information from a petitioner (after filing its petition) pursuant to 37 C.F.R. §...more
On December 3, 2015, in MCM Portfolio LLC v. Hewlett-Packard Co., a panel of the Federal Circuit unanimously upheld the constitutionality of IPR proceedings, finding that delegation of patent invalidity determinations to a...more
On December 17, 2015, in Merck v. Gnosis, the Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB’s IPR Decision finding a pharmaceutical patent invalid for obviousness. Justice Newman vigorously dissented from the majority’s view (Justices...more
On December 3, 2015, the Federal Circuit issued a notice of proposed changes to its Rules of Practice, many of which relate to IPR practice under the AIA... Some of the proposed changes impact the manner by which appeals from...more
Following a string of denials, the PTAB has recently instituted IPR against several pharmaceutical patents where the petitions were filed by entities linked to hedge funds. Prior to these recent institution decisions, there...more
The PTAB has denied petitions filed by the same petitioner against the same claims, even where the subsequent petition relied upon completely different prior art (IPR2014-00506), reasoning that a petitioner should not hold...more