PTAB to Fed. Cir.

I'll verify the court's profile and the tracked case before writing.

The tracked "court" is actually an appellate pathway rather than a district court. Let me verify the appellate statistics and the specific tracked case.

Let me pin down the specific tracked case and the court's current composition.

Court overview

"PTAB to Fed. Cir." is not a federal district court — it describes the appellate pathway from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, headquartered in the Howard T. Markey National Courts Building on Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C. The court was created by the Federal Courts Improvement Act of 1982 (Pub. L. 97-164), merging the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals and the appellate division of the Court of Claims. Its jurisdiction is defined by subject matter rather than geography (28 U.S.C. § 1295), and it has exclusive appellate jurisdiction over PTAB patent decisions under § 1295(a)(4)(A). Per the court's own brochure, intellectual property cases were roughly 67% of its caseload as of FY2018. In 2024, Jason Rantanen's Federal Circuit Dataset Project counted 165 merits decisions arising from the PTO versus 115 from district courts. Because this is an appellate court, the standard district-court comparators — venue competition, transfer motions, jury trials, local patent rules — do not apply here; the analogues are its affirmance rates, Rule 36 practice, and docket speed.

Docket reputation

It is not a "rocket docket," but it is a high-volume, high-affirmance, patent-heavy docket. Finnegan's annual analysis (Law360, Feb. 2025) found 219 Federal Circuit decisions in PTAB appeals in 2024: 184 (84%) affirmed in full, 12 (5.5%) reversed at least in part, and 23 (10.5%) vacated at least in part and remanded. Cumulative figures through December 31, 2024, also from Finnegan: in IPR appeals the court affirmed the PTAB on every issue in 977 cases (74.87%) and reversed or vacated every issue in 157 (12.03%). Rantanen's 2024 data show 84% full affirmance from the USPTO and 92% affirmance in full or part, against a lower 65% full affirmance rate for district court appeals. Finnegan also found no clear pro-patentee or pro-challenger bias in the subset of PTAB appeals won by appellants. Speed: MoFo's appellate tracker reports a median of roughly 427 days from notice of appeal to decision in PTAB cases — comparable to district court patent appeals — with roughly 150 days from appendix filing to oral argument and about 38–42 days from argument to a nonprecedential decision. There are no jury trials; cases are heard by three-judge panels, with occasional en banc review. A structural feature of this pathway is jurisdictional: under 35 U.S.C. § 314(d) and Cuozzo, Thryv, and St. Jude v. Volcano, the court generally cannot review PTAB institution denials, and mandamus relief is rarely granted — Rantanen found only one of 20 mandamus petitions arising from district courts granted in 2024.

Rules and procedures

The distinctive procedural rules sit on both ends of the pathway. At the Federal Circuit, Fed. Cir. R. 36 permits disposition by summary affirmance without opinion, and Fed. Cir. R. 47.5 governs nonprecedential dispositions. Finnegan reports that the court issued Rule 36 affirmances in 592 of 1,382 cumulative IPR/CBM/PGR appeals (42.84%) through the end of 2024, though the ratio has trended downward; Amit R. Vora of Kasowitz Benson Torres put the 2024 figure at about 40% (National Law Journal, Mar. 2025). Petitions urging Supreme Court review of Rule 36 practice (Bobcar Media, Virement Ventures, Schwendimann v. Neenah) were denied certiorari. Wilson Sonsini's 2024 PTAB Year in Review notes the court has trended toward short nonprecedential opinions rather than Rule 36 in some cases. On the PTAB side, the operative rules are 37 C.F.R. Part 42 and the Consolidated Trial Practice Guide, plus the 2024 USPTO rulemakings on Director Review (89 Fed. Reg. 79744) and on briefing of discretionary-denial issues (89 Fed. Reg. 28693). There is no appellate equivalent of the Eastern District of Texas patent rules or the Western District of Texas claim-construction order.

Notable cases and trends

The single tracked case is Cisco Systems, Inc. v. Ramot at Tel Aviv University Ltd., recorded with a February 16, 2022 disposition of "affirmed." I could not independently confirm a February 16, 2022 merits disposition in that party pair; the publicly indexed Federal Circuit documents I located are (i) In re Cisco Systems Inc., No. 2020-148, and Cisco Systems Inc. v. Ramot, Nos. 2020-2047/-2049 (Fed. Cir. Oct. 30, 2020) — dismissing appeals of the Board's § 314(a)/NHK-Fintiv institution denials for lack of jurisdiction and denying mandamus (Dyk, Wallach, Taranto) — and (ii) a Rule 36 judgment in Nos. 2024-1726/-1727/-1728 (Fed. Cir. Apr. 13, 2026), affirming PTAB final written decisions in IPR2022-00575, -00576, and -01283 (per curiam: Moore, Mayer, Lourie). The dispute has an extensive parallel district court history: Ramot's E.D. Tex. action (No. 2:19-cv-00225) was stayed pending ex parte reexaminations, and Cisco's later Delaware declaratory judgment action (No. 21-1365) produced an indefiniteness ruling on the '998 patent in November 2024. The 2020 orders are the notable public rulings from this line — they are among the decisions that cemented the non-appealability of institution denials. Broader trends worth noting on this docket include de novo appellate review of claim construction, tightening of damages-expert gatekeeping (EcoFactor v. Google, en banc), and continuing litigation over IPR estoppel scope (Ingenico v. IOENGINE).

Judges

No judges were specified in the tracked-case list I was given, so the following are drawn only from the published panels in this line and from public reporting on the court's composition. Chief Judge Kimberly A. Moore, Circuit Judge Alan D. Lourie (the court's longest-serving active judge and, per Wilson Sonsini's 2024 review, the most frequent opinion writer in PTAB appeals from 2022–2024), and Circuit Judge Haldane Robert Mayer sat on the April 2026 Rule 36 panel; Judges Timothy B. Dyk, Evan J. Wallach, and Richard G. Taranto sat on the October 2020 orders. Judge Pauline Newman remains a judge of the court but, per Wilson Sonsini and other published reporting, has not been hearing appeals during the relevant period. I did not find published Lex Machina, Unified Patents, or Reuters analysis assigning plaintiff- or defendant-friendly characterizations to individual Federal Circuit judges, and I have not attempted to do so here; the Finnegan analysis cited above expressly found no consistent pro-patentee or pro-challenger tilt in PTAB appeals overall.