Defendant
1 case as defendant.
Not a company — a government official named as a party. "Andrei Iancu" in this database is a natural person, not a corporate entity. He is the former Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), confirmed unanimously by the Senate and serving from 2018 to 2021. Before and after that tenure he was a patent litigator: managing partner of Irell & Manella (2012–2018), and since July 2023 a partner and co-head of the Intellectual Property & Technology Litigation Group at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, based in Los Angeles with an office in Washington, D.C. (Sources: USPTO/House testimony bio; Sullivan & Cromwell; Chambers.)
Why he appears in the case data. Under 35 U.S.C. § 319, appeals from Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decisions are captioned against the sitting USPTO Director in his official capacity. The single tracked case is therefore Realtime Data, LLC v. Andrei Iancu, Fed. Cir. No. 18-1154 (decided Jan. 10, 2019) — an appeal of an inter partes review in which the Director was the nominal appellee, not a litigant with a commercial interest. The underlying dispute was Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. v. Realtime Data LLC (IPR2016-00783), concerning Realtime's data-compression patent (U.S. Pat. No. 6,597,812).
Litigation posture. The defendant count of 1 reflects only this official-capacity appeal; it says nothing about Iancu's own litigation conduct or any patent portfolio. He holds no patents or products, and is neither an operating company nor a patent assertion entity. Because USPTO Directors are routinely named in Federal Circuit appeals, this entry should be read as a government-official placeholder rather than a corporate party.
Context. The Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB's finding that the challenged claims were obvious over prior art (O'Brien and the Nelson data-compression text), a precedential decision authored by Judge Stoll. The real adverse party, Realtime Data LLC (d/b/a IXO), is a well-documented patent assertion entity that has filed numerous infringement suits, frequently in the Eastern District of Texas. No verified headcount, revenue, or ownership data applies here, since no company is involved.
Federal Circuit appeal from IPR2016-00783 concerning U.S. Pat. No. 6,597,812. The court affirmed the PTAB's decision on January 10, 2019; mandate issued April 22, 2019.