USPTO

USPTO (Patent Trial and Appeal Board) — Patent Litigation Profile

Court overview. The "USPTO" docket here is not an Article III district court but the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), the Alexandria, Va.–based administrative tribunal that adjudicates America Invents Act post-grant trials — inter partes review (IPR) and post-grant review (PGR) — as well as ex parte appeals from examiners. There is no regional circuit; PTAB final written decisions are appealed directly to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The PTAB's patent docket dwarfs any single federal district: law-firm reviews of PTAB statistics count roughly 1,433 IPR/PGR petitions filed in FY2025 (Rothwell Figg PTAB Law Blog), while RPX counted 1,280 AIA petitions in calendar 2025 — down ~5% from 1,357 in 2024. The platform tracks just one matter here.

Patent docket reputation. The PTAB is the only U.S. forum where an accused infringer can seek AIA trial cancellation of issued claims, and its statutory deadlines make it the closest analog to a "rocket docket": institution decisions are due within roughly six months of filing (three for PGR) and final written decisions within twelve months of institution. Proceedings are decided by three-judge panels of administrative patent judges (APJs) — no juries — and claim construction follows the same Phillips standard used in district court. Venue and transfer practice are inapplicable; parallel district litigation is instead handled through the Fintiv-based discretionary-denial framework. The defining recent trend is the collapse of the institution rate from ~65% in October 2024 to ~37% by February 2026 (USPTO figures reported by IPWatchdog, Apr. 8, 2026), driven by discretionary denials, not merit outcomes — RPX put the rate at 68% (Q1 2025) → 42% (Q2) → 23% (Q3).

Local rules and procedures. Practice is governed by 37 C.F.R. Part 42 and the USPTO Trial Practice Guide — there are no judge-specific local patent rules as in EDTX/WDTX. Instead, the Board has been reshaped by agency-wide Director memoranda. Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart's March 2025 "Interim Processes for PTAB Workload Management" created a bifurcated process in which the Director, with at least three APJs, first decides discretionary denial — reinstating and expanding Fintiv and adding workload factors (Foley Hoag; Unified Patents mid-year report). Director John Squires then revoked panel delegation entirely via the Oct. 17, 2025 Director Institution Memorandum, centralizing all IPR/PGR institution decisions in himself; the first such decision denied 13 unrelated IPRs in a single document on Oct. 31, 2025 (Finnegan, "At the PTAB"). Real-party-in-interest scrutiny was likewise tightened by the precedential Corning Optical designation (Oct. 2025).

Notable cases. The sole tracked matter — Unified Patents, LLC v. Ideahub Inc., filed Aug. 28, 2026 — extends a decade-long validity war between Unified (a recurring anti-NPE petitioner) and Ideahub over video-codec/HEVC patents. Unified has already prevailed at the PTAB in this series: in IPR2020-00702 (U.S. Patent 9,641,849), the Board found all challenged claims unpatentable, affirmed in Ideahub Inc. v. Unified Patents, LLC, No. 22-1160 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 10, 2023); in PGR2022-00044 (U.S. Patent 11,122,274), a Feb. 5, 2024 final written decision cancelled all claims, later affirmed by the Federal Circuit (No. 24-1684). Unified also opened an ex parte reexamination of Ideahub's U.S. Patent 10,904,539 on Jan. 31, 2025 (Unified Patents news). The specific Aug. 28, 2026 filing is too recent to be publicly indexed as of this writing, so its proceeding type and number could not be independently confirmed — but the caption matches a new PTAB AIA trial or reexamination petition.

Judges. Panels are drawn from a corps of roughly 200 APJs (reported "below 200" after ~13% attrition by May 2025, per then-Chief Judge Scott Boalick; Bloomberg Law). Current leadership, reliably sourced, includes Director John Squires, who personally decides all AIA institution; Chief Judge Kalyan Deshpande (elevated from acting chief in late 2025; Scale Juris); and Vice Chief Judge Michael Kim, both of whom led the USPTO's "USPTO Hour" briefings on the new Director institution process (Finnegan). In the tracked Ideahub line, the IPR2020-00702 panel comprised APJs Kevin W. Cherry (author), Bryan F. Moore, and Monica S. Ullagaddi. No panel is yet assigned to the Aug. 2026 tracked filing, consistent with the new Director-centric institution framework.