Litigation

New Balance Athletics, Inc. v. Nike, Inc.

institution denied

IPR2025-00020

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Court: USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board
Filed: 2024-11-05
Terminated: 2025-06-09

Patents at issue (1)

Plaintiffs (1)

π New Balance Athletics, Inc.

Defendants (1)

Δ Nike, Inc.

Summary

New Balance filed an inter partes review challenging the '932 patent after Nike served infringement contentions in the Massachusetts case. The PTAB denied institution on the merits on June 9, 2025.

Case overview & background

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Key legal developments & outcome

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Plaintiff representatives

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Defendant representatives

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Record id: 8898932-ipr2025-00020 · edit in Admin

Further reading

KSR International v. Teleflex (2007)
Pre-KSR, an obviousness rejection required explicit teaching, suggestion, or motivation in the prior art. Post-KSR, common sense, design needs, and predictable variations all do the work — and most patents don't survive.
Festo Corp. v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co. (2002)
Narrow your claim during prosecution and you presumptively give up the equivalents in between. The presumption is rebuttable, but in practice the prosecution history is a defendant's gold mine.
Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories (2012)
The two-step framework defendants now recite from memory comes from Mayo, not Alice. Mayo is the often-overlooked but doctrinally essential ancestor of every modern § 101 motion.
What it costs to get a patent (AIPLA Economic Survey)
A US utility patent costs a median of $8,000-$12,000 in attorney fees to draft and file, depending on the technology — before USPTO fees, before drawings, and before the first office action. Here's the full bill, and why it's a rounding error next to enforcing the thing.
Prior-art research, old way vs new way — a side-by-side comparison
Defense is expensive because reading thousands of pages of patents takes time. AI doesn't change that for the lawyer's strategic work — but the time-on-pages part collapses by orders of magnitude.

All resources →