Plaintiff
2 cases as plaintiff.
Unified Patents, LLC is a private, membership-based organization founded in 2012 that works to deter patent assertions from non-practicing entities (NPEs), often called "patent trolls." Headquartered in the Washington, D.C. area, the company is backed by private equity firm WestView Capital Partners, which made a growth investment in 2019. While some sources state a San Jose, California headquarters, recent information points to the D.C. area. Employee counts vary by source, with estimates ranging from 36 to under 100.
The company’s primary service is providing patent risk mitigation for its members, which include over 350 companies ranging from startups to large technology corporations like Google and NetApp. Unified Patents monitors NPE activity and challenges the validity of patents being asserted by NPEs in specific technology areas, or "Zones," such as cloud storage, content delivery, and blockchain. It achieves this mainly by filing inter partes reviews (IPRs) and other post-grant proceedings at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) to invalidate patents it deems to be of poor quality. The company states that it never pays NPEs to purchase or license patents, in order to avoid incentivizing further NPE activity.
Unified Patents' litigation posture is unique. It acts as a defensive patent aggregator, but its methods place it in the role of plaintiff or petitioner. The provided case data, showing one plaintiff case at the PTAB and zero defendant cases, is characteristic of its business model. Unified proactively challenges patents asserted by other entities against its members. This activity is exclusively at the PTAB, an administrative venue for challenging patent validity, rather than in district court infringement litigation.
The company's strategy is to deter litigation by invalidating the patents that form the basis of NPE lawsuits. The tracked case, Unified Patents v. Cortex MCP Inc., is an example of its core business, where it initiates a proceeding at the PTAB to challenge a patent's validity. This model has sometimes led to disputes over whether Unified's members, such as Apple and Samsung in one notable case, should be identified as the real parties-in-interest in its PTAB petitions.
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An Inter Partes Review filed by petitioner Unified Patents against patent owner Cortex MCP Inc. before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). A Final Written Decision has been issued.
An inter partes review (IPR) filed by Unified Patents challenging the validity of patent 8,224,794. The PTAB did not institute the IPR on procedural grounds.