Iancu

Entity overview. The "Iancu" in this dataset is not a company. It is Andrei Iancu, who served as Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from February 2018 to January 2021. He appears here in his official capacity as the nominal defendant in a Federal Circuit appeal of Patent Trial and Appeal Board decisions, the standard caption for such appeals. Before the USPTO, Iancu spent two decades at Irell & Manella LLP (managing partner 2012–2018); after leaving government he became a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP and co-founded the Council for Innovation Promotion. He holds a J.D. and M.S./B.S. in engineering from UCLA. Biographical details are documented in USPTO, House Judiciary, and Sullivan & Cromwell materials; no employee count, revenue, or ticker applies, as this is a government role, not a business.

Products / services / operations. As USPTO Director, Iancu led an agency of roughly 12,000–13,000 employees with an annual budget of about $3–3.5 billion, overseeing patent and trademark examination and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. This is a government agency, not an operating company or an NPE; there is no patent portfolio being asserted by "Iancu."

Patent-litigation posture. The single tracked case is not commercial patent litigation between private parties. The dataset shows zero plaintiff cases and one defendant case, which reflects the statutory convention that the USPTO Director is named as defendant when a party appeals a PTAB ruling under 35 U.S.C. §§ 141–146.

Notable case context. PPC Broadband, Inc. v. Iancu, Nos. 2017-1362/-1363/-1364 (Fed. Cir. July 3, 2018), was an appeal from inter partes reviews of PPC's coaxial-cable-connector patents. Corning Optical Communications RF filed the original IPR petitions but settled and withdrew; the USPTO intervened, and the appeal proceeded against Iancu as Director. The court again rejected the Board's obviousness reasoning on the "maintain electrical continuity" limitations and its objective-indicia analysis, and remanded.