New Developments in Obviousness-Type Double Patenting and Original Patent Requirements — Patents: Post-Grant Podcast
Inter Partes Review: Validity Before the PTAB
On March 13, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a decision in the case of In Re: Xencor, Inc. In this Appeal from the Appeals Review Panel of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (ARP), with regard to...more
Recent changes at the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) have brought uncertainty to inter partes review and post-grant review practitioners before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). These procedural and...more
In re: Forest, No. 2023-1178 (Fed. Cir. (PTAB) Apr. 3, 2025). Opinion by Chen, joined by Taranto and Schall. In 2016, an inventor filed a patent application that claimed priority to an application filed in 1995. The Patent...more
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit dismissed an appeal from a patent applicant seeking provisional rights on a patent that would issue only after it had already expired, finding that the applicant lacked the...more
On March 24, the Federal Circuit held in In re Riggs that for a published non-provisional patent application to be prior art under pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102(e)(1) based on an earlier provisional filing date, all citations to...more
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit established a more demanding test for determining whether a published patent application claiming priority to a provisional application is considered prior art under pre-America...more
Last week a remarkably interesting Federal Circuit case was decided concerning whether an asserted reference was properly shown to qualify as prior art in the rejection of a pending patent application. The pending application...more
In re: Riggs, Appeal No. 2022-1945 (Fed. Cir. Mar. 24, 2025) Our Case of the Week explores the power of an examiner to request a rehearing after the Board has entered a decision on an application. The case also relates to...more
This article continues our analysis of over 89,000 patents to determine how the number of office actions to allowance during prosecution impacts litigation outcomes. Last month we discussed how prosecution length impacts...more
After creating something of a frisson due to the apprehension that the Federal Circuit might be convinced to re-evaluate whether it was a necessary element for establishing obviousness for the skilled artisan to have had a...more
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
Apple Inc. v. Gesture Technology Partners, LLC, Appeal Nos. 2023-1475, -1533 (Fed. Cir. Mar. 4, 2025) Our Case of the Week is a high-stakes appeal from an inter partes review concerning a patent titled “Camera Based...more
This Article analyzes over 89,000 patents litigated over a twenty-year period to determine how the number of office actions to allowance during prosecution impacts rates of invalidity during subsequent litigation. Many...more
Welcome to the Intellectual Property Litigation Newsletter, our review of decisions and trends in the intellectual property arena. In this edition, we learn that the Federal Circuit always says never, patent publications...more
In September of last year, and in light of a corresponding Japanese patent infringement suit, I published an article detailing how The Pokémon Company had filed two patent applications at the United States Patent and...more
In this edition of The Precedent, we outline the recent federal circuit decision in Lynk Labs, Inc. v. Samsung Elecs. Co. This case addresses the date on which a pre-AIA published patent application obtains its status as...more
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has a history of attempting to challenge judicial decisions that the Office, usually for its own policy reasons, takes issue with.[1] Recently, the Office decided to challenge the...more
On January 14, 2025, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a precedential decision in Lynk Labs, Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co., No. 23-2346 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 14, 2025), addressing whether a...more
On appeal from an inter partes review (“IPR”), the Federal Circuit held that, under pre-America Invents Act (“pre-AIA”) law, a published patent application is prior art as of its filing date as opposed to its later date of...more
Published Patent Applications Are Prior Art as of the Filing Date, Not the Publication Date - Lynk Labs raises a simple question of statutory interpretation with surprisingly important ramifications: in inter partes review,...more
In Lynk Labs, Inc., v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the Federal Circuit reinforced that patent applications may serve as prior art in IPR proceedings as of their filing date—even where those applications were not published...more
As 2024 draws to a close, several crucial developments — some aimed at modernizing long-standing legal practices, others addressing emerging challenges — have reached patent law. Originally published in Law360 - December...more
Patent owners with robust continuation filing strategies can breathe a sigh of relief as the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) has withdrawn a proposed rule, which would have weakened patents linked to one...more
The Supreme Court denies Cellect LLC's petition for certiorari to consider whether patent term adjustment ("PTA") should be included in patent term for obviousness-type double patenting ("ODP") purposes....more
The explosion of artificial intelligence has raised some challenging questions in patent law, particularly with prior art, or the body of knowledge available prior to the filing of patent application. Two of the most...more