Company overview. This profile entry is not a company: "John A. Squires" is an individual named in his official capacity as Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The USPTO is a federal agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce, headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, and traces its origins to the 1836 Patent Act. Squires, a former patent attorney and Goldman Sachs chief IP counsel, was confirmed by the Senate in September 2025. The Commerce Department describes the agency as a roughly $5 billion operation with about 13,500–14,000 employees across the U.S. and Puerto Rico; no public/private ownership or market cap applies.
Operations. The USPTO examines and grants patents and trademark registrations, and administers post-grant review through the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). Under Squires, the agency has emphasized cutting the examination backlog, "born strong" patent quality, expanded use of AI-assisted prior-art searching, and a more permissive Section 101 eligibility stance. It is a government agency, not an NPE or an operating company with commercial products.
Litigation posture. The tracked docket shows a single case in which Squires is the named defendant — a nominal, official-capacity role. These Federal Circuit appeals arise from PTAB inter partes review decisions, where the USPTO Director is the formal appellee defending the Board's rulings. The case involves no plaintiff-side assertion by the agency; the real adversarial parties are the patent owner and the IPR petitioner.
Notable case. Manufacturing Resources International, Inc. v. Squires (Fed. Cir., Judge Taranto) concerns MRI's patents on cooling systems for electronic displays (U.S. Patent Nos. 10,506,740 and 11,013,142), challenged by Samsung Electronics in IPRs. The Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB's obviousness findings — one related appeal decided by Rule 36 judgment in April 2026 and a companion appeal affirmed by opinion on April 7, 2026.