US 11759935

Patent Overview — US 11759935 B2

Title: Percussion tool

Assignee: Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation (original assignee and current assignee). Assignment recorded 2021-03-02, naming inventors Zawisza, Van Hoorn, and Zimany as assignors. Inventors listed: Matthew S. Zawisza, Andrew D. Van Hoorn, Ethan T. Zimany.

Key dates (as listed; the source labels priority and legal status as assumptions/not legal conclusions):

• Prior art date / priority date: 2018-01-26
• Application number: US 17/158,122; filing date: 2021-01-26
• Publication of US 2021/0146519 A1: 2021-05-20
• Granted / publication of US 11759935 B2: 2023-09-19
• Status: Active; adjusted expiration 2039-08-22
• Other version cited: US 2021/0146519 A1

Purpose and plain-language scope (per the supplied text): The document is classified as a percussive tool — specifically under B25D 11/00 (portable percussive tools with electromotor or other motor drive) and related subclasses covering driving the impulse member (including crank mechanisms and fluid-cushion arrangements), handle mountings, hammer pistons/anvils/guide sleeves, reaction-force damping, and lubrication, plus B25F 5/00–5/02 (casings, bodies, handles) and battery-related H01M 50/247. The prior-art keywords listed (motor, percussion tool, housing, controller, battery pack) indicate the disclosed subject matter concerns a motor-driven percussion tool having a housing, a controller, and a battery pack.

What the supplied excerpt does not establish: It contains no claim language, no abstract, no description of components or operation, and no drawings detail. It therefore does not establish the actual claimed scope, the specific control scheme, or any structural or functional relationships among the motor, controller, and battery pack. Any "scope" statement above is limited to classification headings and prior-art keywords, not to claims. Legal status, priority, and dates are expressly described in the source as assumptions and not legal conclusions.

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11759935/en

I'll run targeted litigation searches for this specific patent number across patent litigation trackers and court sources.

Let me narrow the search specifically to patent (not trademark) assertions and any PTAB/ITC proceedings.

Two patent (non-trademark) cases involving Milwaukee Tool surfaced. I need to verify whether US 11,759,935 is among the asserted patents.

Litigation search: US Patent 11,759,935

Bottom line

No litigation was found in which US Patent 11,759,935 ("Percussion tool," Milwaukee Electric Tool Corp.) is identified as an asserted patent. I searched patent-litigation and PTAB/court sources using the literal number "11759935" and the formatted "11,759,935," and the results returned no case naming this patent as a patent-in-suit. I cannot certify that no such litigation exists — see the limitations section at the end — but nothing in the results that did return links this patent to any district court action, ITC investigation, PTAB proceeding, or CAFC appeal.

Consistent with the instruction not to auto-correct identifiers: the results discussed below concern other Milwaukee Tool patents. I flag each one explicitly as not involving '935 rather than folding it into an answer about '935.

What the searches actually surfaced (and why none of it is '935)

1. Milwaukee Electric Tool Corp. v. Ingersoll Rand Inc. — 1:26-cv-00211 (D. Del.)

• Plaintiff: Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation · Defendant: Ingersoll Rand Inc.
• Jurisdiction: U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware · Judge Maryellen Noreika
• Filed: 2026-02-27 · Nature of suit: 830 Patent · Cause: 35 U.S.C. § 1 Patent Infringement
• Patents asserted (per complaint analysis): '400, '589, '594, '368, '061, '997, '208 — all high-torque cordless impact wrench/tool patents. '935 is not among them.
• Status: open. Scheduling order entered 2026-06-23: Markman hearing 2027-10-01; 7-day jury trial set 2028-10-02.
• Sources: https://ai-lab-cl-prod.azurewebsites.net/case/dct/ded/1:26-cv-00211/doc/analysis/1 ; https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/63373982/Milwaukee_Electric_Tool_Corporation_v_Ingersoll_Rand_Inc ; https://ai-lab.exparte.com/case/dct/ded/1:26-cv-00211/milwaukee-electric-tool-corp-v-ingersoll-rand-inc

2. Milwaukee Electric Tool Corp. v. Klein Tools, Inc. — 1:25-cv-04689 (N.D. Ill.)

• Plaintiff: Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation · Defendant: Klein Tools, Inc.
• Jurisdiction: U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois · Judge John J. Tharp, Jr. (discovery referred to Magistrate Judge Keri L. Holleb Hotaling)
• A patent case (docket shows "Initial Infringement Contentions," "Non-Infringement, Unenforceability, and Invalidity Contentions"). The patents-in-suit were not confirmed in the results returned.
• Status: active; case-management schedule adopted 2025-07-21; pre-settlement call set 2025-08-04.
• Source: https://dockets.justia.com/docket/illinois/ilndce/1:2025cv04689/[477322](/patent/477322)

3. Older/other Milwaukee Tool patent suits (family-adjacent battery patents, not '935)

• Milwaukee Electric Tool Corp. et al. v. Positec Tool Corp., 2:14-cv-01295 (E.D. Wis.) — asserted the '290, '173, '510, '257 lithium-battery patents (battery packs, not percussion tools). https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/[4413137](/patent/4413137)/1/milwaukee-electric-tool-corporation-v-positec-tool-corporation/
• Milwaukee Tool v. Max USA Corp (2:14-cv-01292), v. Tooltechnic Systems LLC (2:14-cv-01294), v. Chervon HK Ltd (2:17-cv-00651) — listed in the Stanford NPE dataset as E.D. Wis. patent cases, none tied to '935. https://npe.law.stanford.edu/cases-by-patent

4. "Schedule A" cases are trademark, not patent.
The large volume of recent Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation v. The Individuals, Corporations... on Schedule A filings (e.g., N.D. Ill. 1:25-cv-08203, 1:25-cv-10821; S.D.N.Y. 1:26-cv-02255, 1:26-cv-02494; W.D. Pa. 2:26-cv-00255) are Lanham Act counterfeit/trademark actions over the MILWAUKEE marks. They do not assert '935. Example: https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/Illinois_Northern_District_Court/1--25-cv-10821/

5. ITC matters. The Commission proceeding in the results concerns Certain Storage Containers and Toolboxes..., Inv. No. 337-TA-1409 (Milwaukee Tool + Keter v. Klein Tools), litigating the '952 and '167 patents and helmet/fish-tape patents — again not '935. https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1557918](/patent/1557918)/download-documents

6. PTAB / Unified Patents portal. No IPR/PGR/CBM petition naming '935 appeared. Unified's portal hits (e.g., CBM2013-00056) were unrelated patents. https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist

Case-table answer to your question

There is no row to populate because, on the record retrieved, no litigation is known involving US Patent 11,759,935. The '935 patent is only three years past issuance (issued 2023-09-19), and it sits in the same family as US 11,059,155 and US 10,926,393 (per the continuity chain in the earlier bibliographic section). No assertion of any family member was found either.

Limitations — please read before relying on the "no litigation" finding

1. Search tooling was incomplete. One search returned a hard step-limit message and another returned no usable result. I was therefore unable to query the specific trackers you named (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) directly for the bare number, and I could not confirm the patents-in-suit in the Klein Tools case (1:25-cv-04689).
2. Absence of hits is not proof of absence. District court complaints, ITC complaints, and PTAB petitions are not comprehensively indexed by general web search, and Schedule A / parallel filings may not name each patent prominently. To close this out definitively, check:
   • PACER / Docket Navigator / Lex Machina — search "11,759,935" and "11759935" across all districts;
   • Unified Patents litigation portal and PTAB EndPoint — for IPR/PGR/CBM and FWDs;
   • USITC EDIS — for Section 337 investigations naming the patent;
   • CAFC docket (CM/ECF) — for any appeal involving the '935 patent or its family.
3. Do not conflate similar numbers. The results included unrelated matters such as IPR2025-00934/-00935 (WILUS patents) and application number 18/158,122 (a Downing Wellhead eGrant, distinct from this patent's application 17/158,122). The string "935" appearing in an IPR number is not a reference to this patent.

If you can confirm the patents-in-suit in Milwaukee v. Klein Tools (1:25-cv-04689), that would either add the first known '935 case or definitively rule it out — that is the one open thread worth pulling.

I'll verify the structured ODP data against live sources before writing anything.

Let me dig into the Milwaukee/Klein Tools PTAB matters and check whether any of them target this patent.

Let me run two final confirmations — one on the patent's own family and one on whether this patent has been asserted at all.

PTAB / AIA Trial Proceedings — US 11,759,935 B2 ("Percussion tool")

Bottom line up front: There are no AIA trial proceedings on file against this patent. That is the canonical answer from the structured ODP block, and my independent web searches did not contradict it. I found no IPR, PGR, or CBM naming US 11,759,935 — and, notably, no litigation asserting it either. Details, caveats, and what this means for a defendant are below.

---

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 11,759,935: 0. Breakdown by status: 0 active, 0 with claims invalidated, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution-denied. Defensive posture: this is not a "hardened by surviving IPRs" patent and not a "claims already canceled" patent — it is an untested patent. Every one of the 36 claims (per the earlier bibliographic section) stands as issued, with the full presumption of validity, and no § 315(e)(2) or § 325(e)(2) estoppel has been created by anyone. A defendant's IPR/PGR options are entirely open; the counterweight is that a challenger would be first, bears the entire burden, and would be developing the invalidity record from scratch.

The format below is templated for per-proceeding entries. There are none to populate, so I have substituted a record of what I checked and what I found instead.

No proceedings to report

• Type: N/A
• Filed: N/A
• Status: N/A
• Judge panel: N/A
• Petition grounds: N/A
• Institution decision: N/A
• Final Written Decision: N/A
• Settlement / termination: N/A
• Appeal: N/A
• Defensive value: Because no petition has ever been filed, there is no FWD to cite, no claim-level disposition to rely on, and no petitioner-side estoppel to hide behind. A defendant today would be the first mover on the administrative track.

What I actually checked (so you can audit the negative):

1. Structured source of record — USPTO Open Data Portal ("PTAB proceedings on file" block in this prompt): returns no AIA trial proceedings for US 11,759,935. Per the block's own instruction, the default is "no PTAB activity on file."
2. Web searches for the patent number (11759935, "11,759,935", "11,059,155", "10,926,393") against PTAB/IPR terms: returned no proceeding tied to this patent family member. Hits were unrelated patents and unrelated patent families.
3. Web searches for Milwaukee Electric Tool PTAB activity: surfaced a substantial and active Milwaukee docket — but none of it touches the '935 patent. See the "related but distinct" note immediately below.

Related but distinct Milwaukee Electric Tool PTAB activity — do not conflate

These matters involve the same patent owner (Milwaukee as PO) or Milwaukee as petitioner, but they are different patents and have no estoppel or preclusive effect on US 11,759,935:

Pattern signal from these: Milwaukee litigates a large overlapping patent portfolio (the '935 percussion-tool family is only one strand of it), and when it is attacked it actively uses discretionary denial — requesting Director Review and winning it — to keep AIA trials from being instituted at all. That is useful context for predicting patent-owner behavior, but it is not a record in this patent.

Flag — do not repeat the error in the earlier section: the prior section correctly warned that "18/158,122" (Downing Wellhead / Kuehn et al., US 12,134,952) is a different application from this patent's 17/158,122. I concur; nothing in my searches rehabilitates that confusion, and it should not be cited as related to the '935 patent.

---

Strategic summary

Claim status: everything is UNTESTED. No claim of US 11,759,935 — not independent claim 1 (≥ 2.5 J/kg), not claim 14 (≥ 50 W/kg), not claim 26 (≥ 85 kJ/min), and none of the 33 dependent claims — has been canceled, amended, disclaimed, or confirmed in any AIA trial. There is nothing to distinguish as "surviving claims" because there has been no pruning. If you receive a demand letter or complaint asserting this patent, assume all 36 issued claims are live and unavailable for an estoppel-based shortcut.

Estoppel landscape: a blank slate, with one important caveat. Because no IPR/PGR reached a final written decision, § 315(e)(2) and § 325(e)(2) estoppel are not triggered against anyone — no prior petitioner is barred, and no petitioner's grounds are foreclosed to you. This cuts both ways: you have unfettered choice of prior art, but you also cannot piggyback on someone else's work product or invalidity expert. One nuance to watch, given the direction of current USPTO policy: the October 2025 proposed rules (not yet effective as of this writing) would, if finalized, bar an IPR against a patent that has already survived a validity challenge and would require a super-Sotera-style disclaimer of § 102/§ 103 arguments in other venues. Since this patent has survived no challenge, those proposed bars would not apply to it today — but the timetable matters if a challenge is filed and denied, because a denial could foreclose a second bite.

Pattern signals. No petitioner has filed against this patent at all — not once, let alone serially. There is no defensive aggregator (e.g., Unified Patents) in the chain; my searches surfaced none. There is no PTAB appeal, no Federal Circuit appeal, and no parallel litigation that I could find tied to this patent (and the earlier section's CAFC check likewise came up empty, with the caveat that those searches were truncated). Milwaukee's PTAB appearances are as a patent owner defending and, in the Klein Tools matters, as a petitioner asserting — not as a respondent to a percussion-tool validity attack.

The honest read on why there is no PTAB activity. The heuristic "well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs" does not appear to be doing the work here, because I found no evidence this patent has ever been asserted. The absence of PTAB activity is therefore most likely an artifact of a non-asserted, defensive portfolio asset rather than of the patent being unusually strong or unusually weak. Treat the negative as informational, not exculpatory: it tells you nobody has looked hard yet, not that nothing is there.

---

Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant.

• You can say plainly, with support, that no IPR, PGR, or CBM has ever been filed against US 11,759,935. You cannot cite a FWD, because none exists. Any statement that the patent "survived PTAB review" would be false — surviving means an FWD issued, and none did.
• The cleanest attack vector is the patent's own Table. The earlier section flagged that the specification reports the prior-art corded AC breaker at 2.6 J/kg and 55.5 W/kg — values that already exceed the claim 1 (2.5 J/kg) and claim 14 (50 W/kg) thresholds — and at 83.2 kJ/min, just under the claim 26 threshold of 85 kJ/min. For claim 1 and claim 14, the Patent Owner's own admitted prior art appears to satisfy the sole point of novelty. That is a § 102/§ 103 roadmap built from the patent owner's own document, and it is exactly the kind of internal inconsistency an examiner or panel would probe. Again: this is a factual observation about the face of the specification, not a legal conclusion, and I am not opining on whether it renders any claim invalid.
• Consider whether the "mass" and "impact energy" limitations are indefinite or non-enabled under § 112. The claims are drafted to measured performance results ("ratio of impact energy to mass," "blow power to mass," "delivers ≥ 85 kJ per minute") rather than to structure. Depending on how "mass" is defined — tool mass? tool plus battery? tool plus chisel? — that could be a § 112(b) or § 112(a) argument. Note that § 112 is available in a PGR within nine months of issuance only; for this patent (issued 2023-09-19) that window has closed, so a § 112 challenge would have to be raised in district court or the ITC, not in an IPR (§ 311(b) limits IPR to § 102/§ 103 on patents and printed publications).

If you are weighing a petition.

• Statutory deadlines: the PGR window closed on/around 2023-12-19 (nine months from the 2023-09-19 issuance). Any AIA challenge now must be an IPR, which is available for the life of the patent. If you have been served with a complaint, watch the § 315(b) one-year bar — it runs from service and is unforgiving.
• Trial-stage milestones, once instituted: institution decision due within 6 months of the petition's filing date; FWD due within 12 months of the institution decision (extendable to 18 for good cause). There is no pending trial here, so there are no live deadlines to track.
• Claim-drafting caution for your own filings: every ground must map to the claim language as issued. Because the independent claims share an identical structural preamble and differ only in the numerical threshold, a petition will live or die on the measurement methodology for that threshold — pin down your construction of "mass," "impact energy," "blow power," and "per minute" in the petition, not in reply.

If you are the patent owner (Milwaukee).

• The patent is unasserted and un-challenged, which is a clean slate but also an untested one. Given Milwaukee's demonstrated success obtaining discretionary denial in the parallel-ITC Klein Tools matters (IPR2024-01400/-01401; IPR2025-00724, -00892), the same playbook — early discretionary-denial briefing grounded in a co-pending ITC or district proceeding — is the highest-leverage defensive tool if this patent is ever targeted. Note that the applicable Director guidance has been shifting repeatedly through 2025, so confirm the current policy memo before relying on any Fintiv-based strategy.

---

Verification limitations (stated plainly, not buried)

• The 2026-09-29 litigation/CAFC search chain did not fully complete. The earlier section disclosed that its IPR/PGR check hit the tool's step limit; in this run, one targeted search likewise terminated at the step limit before returning results. Accordingly, I can affirmatively report only that the searches that ran surfaced no AIA proceeding and no litigation on US 11,759,935 — not that the negative is exhaustively verified.
• Before relying on the absence of proceedings, confirm against primary sources: the USPTO PTAB EndPoint / PTAB E2E system, the PTAB Decisions library, PACER / Docket Navigator for litigation, and CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com) for any Federal Circuit appeal. A newly filed petition may simply not yet be indexed in the Open Data Portal.
• No proceeding numbers have been invented. Where I listed proceeding numbers above (IPR2024-01400, -01401; IPR2025-00724, -00892; PGR2025-00048; PGR2025-00080), they are reproduced from search results and concern other patents; they are included only as context on the patent owner's behavior, and none should be cited as a proceeding on US 11,759,935.

I'll research the assignment record for this patent across the sources specified.

Let me check the Google Patents legal events and attempt direct Assignment Center queries.

Let me attempt to retrieve the specific assignment reel/frame for the inventor-to-assignee record.

Ownership record — US 11,759,935 B2 ("Percussion tool")

Access caveat (stated up front): In this run I could not pull the USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov) record page directly — my queries returned no Assignment-Center hit page, and the search tool exhausted its step budget before I could query PEDS/ODP and the RPX/Unified directories. What follows is built from (a) the authoritative full text supplied in the prompt (including its Google Patents legal-events block), and (b) cross-checks against patent-family publications. Where a reel/frame is given I cite it; where I could not confirm a field, I say so rather than invent one. Verify the single record below directly at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search patent number 11759935).

---

Inventors

Unusual-pattern check — none found. The classic precursor to a portfolio fire-sale (all inventors leaving the assignee within ~12 months of filing) is absent. All three inventors remain on later Milwaukee continuations in the same family: US 12,472,613 B2 (issued 2025-11-18, from application 18/508,298) and US 2026/0027689 A1 (published 2026-01-29, from application 19/349,021). Continuous co-inventorship on 2025–2026 filings evidences retained employment/engagement with the original assignee, not attrition.

---

Original assignee

Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation (Brookfield, WI; a Delaware corporation), 13135 West Lisbon Road, Brookfield, WI 53005. Assignee of record on the face of US 11,759,935 B2 and current assignee per Google Patents.

• Line of business: Professional/industrial power tools, hand tools, accessories, and battery platforms — a top-tier U.S. operating company in the category.
• Product embodying the claims: Yes. The specification is directed to a cordless (battery-powered) breaker/percussion tool with an anti-vibration system (Figs. 1–28; battery cells "up to about 80 V," "up to about 120 V"). Milwaukee markets cordless demolition/breaking hammers within its battery platforms. (Product-to-claim mapping is asserted at moderate confidence — I did not verify a specific SKU's claim chart in this run.)
• Current status: Operating; not in bankruptcy. Milwaukee is the flagship U.S. subsidiary of Techtronic Industries Co. Ltd. (TTi, Hong Kong; publicly listed). It is an active, well-funded litigant (e.g., Milwaukee Electric Tool Corp. v. Chervon N. Am., E.D. Wis. No. 2:14-cv-01289; v. Hilti; v. Snap-On; v. Positec), though those suits involved Milwaukee's lithium-ion battery patents, not US 11,759,935.

---

Assignment timeline

One (1) recorded assignment is evidenced in the material retrieved. It is the routine inventor→employer assignment; there are no post-issuance assignments, no security interests, no name changes, and no transfers to any third party or NPE.

• 2019-02-26 to 2019-03-05 (executed/signing dates) / recorded 2021-03-02 — Reel 055462/0259
  • Conveyance: Assignment — "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST"
  • Assignor: Zawisza, Matthew S.; Van Hoorn, Andrew D.; Zimany, Ethan T.
  • Assignee: Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation (Brookfield, WI)
  • Correspondent: Not confirmed in retrieved material. I did not capture the correspondent name/address recorded against Reel 055462/0259. For context only (not a confirmed assignment-correspondent finding): the family's patent prosecution attorney/agent of record on the '155 parent is Michael Best & Friedrich LLP, and Milwaukee's internal IP docket email (milwaukeeip@milwaukeetool.com, contact Cheryl Piefer-Wachtel, 13135 W. Lisbon Rd, Brookfield WI) appears as correspondent of record on Milwaukee's trademark filings. Because I cannot pair a name to this specific reel/frame, I am not asserting a correspondent finding — and single appearances would not be a signal anyway.
  • Context: Initial employment assignment — inventors conveying rights to their employer. Not a fire-sale, not a securitization, not a transfer-to-asserter.

Reconciliation note (source conflict to flag): the authoritative full text's Google legal-events block shows the "2021-03-02 Assigned to MILWAUKEE ELECTRIC TOOL CORPORATION … Assignors: ZIMANY, ETHAN T., VAN HOORN, ANDREW D., ZAWISZA, MATTHEW S." event for this application, while the Reel 055462/0259 line (with the 2019 signing dates) surfaced on the related pre-grant publication page US 2021/0146519 A1. These are consistent — the assignment documents were executed in Feb–Mar 2019 (contemporaneous with the parent application Ser. No. 16/257,600, filed 2019-01-25) and recorded against this continuation on 2021-03-02, one month after the continuation was filed (2021-01-26). I treat Reel 055462/0259 as the family-level inventor assignment and flag that a practitioner should confirm whether the USPTO also carries a separate recording against the parent.

No other assignments exist in the retrieved record. No Acacia/Marathon/IV/Wi-LAN/Conversant/etc. link; no security agreement; no release; no merger or change of name.

---

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 11759935
    2019 : Parent filed
         : Inventors sign assignment
    2021 : Continuation filed Jan 26
         : Assignment recorded Mar 2
         : Recorded at Reel 055462 0259
    2023 : Patent issued Sep 19
    2025 : Divisional issued to Milwaukee
    2026 : Continuation published to Milwaukee

---

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Signal count: zero present, one unclear (unassessable), seven not present.

---

Verdict

Insufficient data (only the original assignment).

The assignment record for US 11,759,935 consists of a single link — the Feb–Mar 2019 inventor assignment to Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation, recorded 2021-03-02 at Reel 055462/0259 — with no post-issuance transfers of any kind, which is itself the finding: the patent remains with its original operating-company assignee. There is no NPE chain to evaluate and no NPE/troll signal is present; the "insufficient data" label reflects the absence of any chain beyond the initial employment assignment, not any ambiguity about NPE status. Confirm the single reel/frame and check for any late-recorded security interest at the USPTO Assignment Center: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (patent number 11759935).

I'll run targeted searches for the prior-art citations listed on the face of US 11,759,935.

The first pass returned unrelated content. Let me target the actual front-page citation list.

Let me pull the front-page citation list directly from FPO/Justia/Google Patents mirrors.

I hit the tool's step limit before I could exhaustively pull every citation, so I'll report exactly what I retrieved, what it means, and what I could not verify — rather than filling the gaps from memory.

---

Prior-art citation analysis — US 11,759,935 B2 ("Percussion tool")

1. What I could and could not retrieve

Retrieved: The Google Patents family page for US 2021/0146519 A1 (the pre-grant publication of application 17/158,122, i.e., the same application that issued as US 11,759,935 B2) displays a section headed "Patent Citations (17)" — these are the references listed in the (56) References Cited field and printed on the face of the '935 patent.

Not retrieved: The list is rendered truncated (the page shows only the first several entries before an ellipsis). I recovered 8 of the 17 citations. The remaining 9 — and any foreign patent documents and non-patent literature (NPL) in the (56) field — were not retrieved. I am not going to guess at them.

By contrast, the parent US 11,059,155 shows "Patent Citations (340)", which is why the '935 continuation's much shorter list is worth noting: the examiner carried forward only a small set for this continuation.

⚠️ Caveats, stated plainly:

• A "cited reference" is not automatically "prior art" as a legal matter; a reference's status depends on its date, its content, and how it was applied.
• Google Patents marks some entries with an asterisk; I am treating the asterisk convention as unreliable and am not using it to assert which references were cited by the examiner versus by the applicant.
• Summary sections generated earlier in this analysis did not retrieve this citation list; this section does not contradict them, it fills a gap they flagged as unverified.

---

2. The recovered citations (8 of 17)

---

3. § 102 anticipation analysis — this is the key point

None of the eight recovered references anticipates claims 1, 14, or 26 as a whole. Here is why, and it is the analytically decisive feature of this patent:

All three independent claims (as reproduced in the authoritative full text and corroborated by the Google Patents claim listing) consist of:

1. a structural preamble — housing; electric motor in the housing; battery pack supported by the housing with cells "having a nominal voltage of up to 120 Volts"; and a motor-driven percussion mechanism with a striker supported for reciprocation; plus
2. a numerical performance limitation that supplies the novelty:
   • Claim 1: impact energy / mass ≥ 2.5 J/kg
   • Claim 14: blow power / mass ≥ 50 W/kg
   • Claim 26: ≥ 85 kJ of impact energy per minute

References #1–#5 (the Hilti pneumatic-hammer/driving-device group) and #7–#8 each speak to elements of the structural preamble only. They disclose percussion mechanisms with reciprocating strikers, but they are corded or otherwise do not disclose a battery pack with cells up to 120 V nominal together with the recited performance threshold. Under § 102, a reference must disclose every limitation arranged as in the claim; a reference that lacks the performance parameter cannot anticipate.

Reference #6 (US 2014/0131059 A1, Milwaukee) is the closest of the eight because it is the only one that plausibly touches both the brushless-motor element and the ≤120 V battery-pack element. But it is a cordless drilling/fastening-class high-power tool disclosure — it does not disclose a percussion mechanism with a reciprocating striker, still less the J/kg, W/kg, or kJ/min thresholds. So it too falls short of § 102 anticipation of claims 1/14/26.

Conclusion: On the eight references recovered, the citation set is § 103 / background art supporting the structural preamble and dependent-claim subject matter — not § 102 anticipatory art against the independent claims.

---

4. Which cited art implicates which dependent claims

I could not retrieve dependent claims 2–13, 15–25, 27–36 verbatim, so I am not mapping references to individual dependent claims with confidence. However, the specification (authoritative text) discloses dependent-claim-grade subject matter including: an anti-vibration system (swing-arm linkage, leaf spring, foam bumper, counterweight 500–1,000 g, natural frequency 20–23 Hz); a battery guard; light sources 412/414 with lenses; a Zerk lubricant fitting; a bottom-end carrying handle; battery-pack construction (up to twenty cells, 3.0–5.0 Ah, 40–60 A, ≤~6 lb); and the load/no-load motor-control methods of FIGS. 14–19. If any of those appear in dependent claims, the Hilti pneumatic-hammer group (#1–#5) becomes materially more relevant (anti-vibration/percussion mechanism structures), and US 2014/0131059 (#6) becomes materially more relevant (brushless motor + battery pack). That mapping needs verification against the actual dependent-claim text.

---

5. The most relevant prior art — including art inside the patent

The single most relevant prior-art showing on this record is not in the (56) list at all. It is the prior-art corded AC breaker disclosed in the '935 patent's own Table, which reports:

As flagged in the earlier section, the prior art row exceeds the claim 1 (2.5 J/kg) and claim 14 (50 W/kg) thresholds and is only ~2% under the claim 26 threshold (83.2 vs. 85 kJ/min). That is a face-of-the-document observation; I make no validity conclusion here.

Separately, a non-patent-literature reference — "Milwaukee Tool, K2500H Fact Sheet, 2017" — appears in the citation list of the family member US 10,814,468 B2 (Krug et al., Milwaukee), which is in the same percussion-tool family. Because I could not retrieve NPL for the '935 specifically, I cannot confirm whether that K2500H fact sheet is cited on the '935's own face; it is exactly the sort of product literature that would be probative of the numerical thresholds, and it should be checked directly.

---

6. Gaps I am flagging rather than papering over

1. 9 of 17 US/foreign patent citations were not retrieved — the Google Patents list truncated. Direct verification against the USPTO PatentCenter / Patent Full-Text (patft) "Referenced By"/"References Cited" view of US 11,759,935, or the PDF front page, is required for a complete set.
2. No NPL / foreign documents confirmed for the '935 itself.
3. Dependent claims 2–13, 15–25, 27–36 were not retrieved verbatim, so reference-to-dependent-claim anticipation mapping is provisional.
4. Not all litigation/PTAB databases were searched to exhaustion (per the earlier section, those searches also did not complete). Absence of an IPR/PGR or district-court challenge in this analysis is not evidence that none exists.
5. No reference in the recovered set reads on the performance thresholds of claims 1, 14, or 26. If a § 102 challenge to those claims exists, it will rest on art (product literature, catalog data, or a prior cordless breaker) that discloses the measured performance, not on the structural patent art cited here.

Bottom line: The recovered citations are structural/background art concentrated on the percussion-mechanism preamble (Hilti group) and the motor/battery architecture (Milwaukee's own US 2014/0131059). None anticipates the three independent claims, whose novelty resides in numerical performance limits that the cited structural art does not disclose. The most probative § 102-type showing on this record is the patent's internally tabulated prior-art corded AC breaker — and the closest thing to a complete answer requires retrieving the 9 missing citations plus any NPL (e.g., the K2500H fact sheet) from the '935 PDF front page.

I'll do a few targeted verification searches on the two load-bearing references before writing the § 103 analysis, then build on the Prior Art section's findings.

Obviousness analysis — US 11,759,935 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Scope and build-on note. This section uses the references identified in the Prior Art section above and does not repeat that section's citation-by-citation description. It adds two things: (i) a verification pass on the three references that carry the analysis, and (ii) the actual § 103 combination reasoning. Consistent with the Prior Art section's conclusion, I treat the references as failing § 102 against claims 1/14/26 and analyze whether they nonetheless render those claims obvious. Nothing here is a legal conclusion on validity.

One correction/advance on the Prior Art section: that section flagged the "Milwaukee Tool, K2500H Fact Sheet, 2017" as unconfirmed on the '935 and only found in the US 10,814,468 family. It is now corroborated as of record on the parent US 11,059,155 — the parent's front matter lists "Milwaukee Tool, K2500H Fact Sheet, 2017, 3 pages," "Milwaukee Tool, K2500H Owner's Manual, 2017, 49 pages," and "Milwaukee Tool, K2500H Product Specification, 2017, 2 pages." This does not contradict the earlier section; it closes the gap it flagged.

---

1. The references that carry the § 103 analysis

The key new fact from the verification pass: the prior-art corded AC breaker tabulated in the '935 specification is the Milwaukee K2500H. The arithmetic is exact: 64 J × 1300 bpm ÷ 60 = 1,386.7 W (~1,387 W) and 64 J × 1300 ÷ 1000 = 83.2 kJ/min, matching the Table's "Prior Art" row to the decimal. The '935's own Table is therefore not generic background — it is the applicant measuring its own prior corded product (mass 25.0 kg) against the claimed tool (28.0 kg).

---

2. The claims and where the novelty actually resides

Per the earlier sections, claims 1, 14, and 26 share an identical structural preamble and differ only in a numeric performance threshold:

Two features of the drafting matter for § 103:

1. "Up to 120 Volts" is a ceiling, not a floor. It is met by any cordless pack of 120 V nominal or less — i.e., 12 V, 18 V, 80 V, etc. It is therefore satisfied by essentially any modern cordless platform pack, including the pack in US 2014/0131059.
2. The claims recite a result, not structure. Once the four structural elements are supplied by the art, the only remaining question is whether the numerical outcome was within the ordinary skill level — which is the classic "optimization of a result-effective variable" question.

---

3. Combination 1 (primary): K2500H literature + US 2014/0131059 → claims 1 and 14

Result: every structural element of claims 1 and 14 is disclosed, and the numeric thresholds are already met by the admitted prior art before any combination is even needed. The only gap between the K2500H alone and claims 1/14 is the substitution of a battery pack for the cord — and that substitution is taught by Milwaukee's own US 2014/0131059. On the face of the applicant's own Table, the claimed ratios (2.6/55.5) are the prior-art ratios, and the '935's commercial embodiment actually lowers power/mass to 54.4 W/kg.

---

4. Combination 2 (alternative/backup): US 7,950,471 (+ US 2009/0020299) + US 2014/0131059

For a challenger who prefers patent art over product literature, the same result is reachable:

• US 7,950,471 / US 2009/0020299 supply "percussion mechanism … including a striker supported for reciprocation" — piston, air spring, anvil, guide tube, eccentric-and-connecting-rod drive (the '935's own FIG. 2 architecture, element-for-element).
• US 2014/0131059 supplies the "electric motor within the housing," the brushless DC motor, and the "battery pack … plurality of battery cells having a nominal voltage of up to 120 Volts."
• Neither supplies the numeric thresholds — but neither does any structural reference, which is the point: the thresholds are design outputs, not structure. A POSA arriving at the claimed structure with a stated productivity goal (and a prior-art corded comparator at 2.6 J/kg / 55.5 W/kg, 83.2 kJ/min) would land inside the claimed numbers by ordinary tuning of the percussion mechanism (striker mass, stroke, air-spring charge, eccentric offset, blow frequency).

This combination is the cleaner § 103 case legally because it stays within patents/printed publications (relevant if the challenge is brought in an IPR, where § 311(b) limits grounds to § 102/§ 103 on patents and printed publications — see the PTAB section's timing discussion).

---

5. Why a POSHA would have combined them (the motivation prong)

Under KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), and MPEP 2143, the motivation need not be found in the references themselves. Each of the following independently supplies it:

1. Substitution of one known element for another to obtain predictable results. Swapping a cord/power cable for a rechargeable battery pack in a hand-held power tool is the archetypal predictable substitution. US 2014/0131059 performs exactly that substitution for a comparably high-power tool.
2. Same field of endeavor / reasonably pertinent art. Both references and the '935 are hand-held electric power tools; Hilti and Milwaukee are direct competitors whose percussion-tool literature cross-cites.
3. Design need / market pressure. The K2500H literature itself foregrounds the tether problem — "Supplied with a 10 m cable allowing for a working area of up to 314 m²." Cord length as an expressed limitation is a direct design incentive to go cordless.
4. The primary reference is "ready for improvement." The K2500H already has the two features the '935's commercial pitch rests on — a brushless motor and an anti-vibration system ("Floating Body AVS") — so the remaining step (cordless) was the obvious next move.
5. The assignee's own art shows the direction. US 2014/0131059 is a Milwaukee publication describing a "high-performance-capable … high-power, high-current, high-torque" cordless tool with a BLDC motor. Applicant's own prior art is strong evidence of what the field, and this applicant, regarded as achievable.
6. "Obvious to try" / finite predictable options. Where a design need exists and there are "a finite number of identified, predictable solutions," pursuing them is obvious. The options for a cordless breaker were the known battery-platform architectures (Milwaukee's own M18/M28-class packs and the '059 BLDC architecture).

Reasonable expectation of success: US 2014/0131059 confirms that a BLDC motor plus a rechargeable pack could deliver high torque/high current in a hand-held tool; the '935 specification itself states its pack outputs "between about 40 A and about 60 A" sustained. A POSA would reasonably expect the same platform to drive a 64 J-class percussion mechanism. There is no teaching away in any retrieved reference from cordless high-power percussion tools.

---

6. The numerical limitations do not rescue the claims

This is the analytically decisive § 103 issue, and the applicant's own Table supplies the ammunition:

Three points follow:

• Claims 1 and 14: the recited thresholds (2.5 J/kg; 50 W/kg) are below the admitted prior art's own values (2.6; 55.5). The prior art therefore already lies inside the claimed performance envelope. Under In re Peterson, 315 F.2d 266 (CCPA 1963) (overlapping/close ranges), and In re Woodruff, 919 F.2d 1575 (Fed. Cir. 1990) (ranges "too close" absent criticality), a claimed numerical limit that the prior art already satisfies is not a patentable distinction. The drafter appears to have set the floors just under the K2500H's measured performance.
• Claim 26: 85 kJ/min is ~2.2 % above the admitted prior art's 83.2 kJ/min, and the '935 only reaches 91.3 kJ/min — a ~10 % improvement. A 2–10 % movement in an output variable is the paradigm of routine optimization of a result-effective variable (In re Aller, 220 F.2d 454 (CCPA 1955); In re Boesch, 617 F.2d 272 (CCPA 1980)). The variable is directly result-effective: kJ/min = blow energy × blow frequency. Merely raising blow frequency from 1300 to ~1328 bpm at 64 J, or nudging blow energy upward, crosses the line — a predictable design choice, not an invention.
• Margins are thin and the trade-off is mundane. The '935's own table shows the cordless conversion reducing W/kg (55.5 → 54.4) while raising J/kg marginally (2.6 → 2.7). That is a design trade-off (heavier tool, retuned energy/frequency), not an unexpected result — it is the opposite of the "unexpected results" that might rebut obviousness.

---

7. Secondary considerations (anticipated rebuttal and why it is weak on this record)

---

8. Dependent claims 2–13, 15–25, and 27–36 — provisional

I do not have verbatim dependent-claim text, so the following is a lead list, not a finding. If the dependents recite the subject matter the specification discloses, the obviousness case weakens markedly for each such claim only if the subject matter was itself novel; on the face of the retrieved art it appears largely to be prior art:

• Anti-vibration / counterweight / swing-arm linkage / leaf spring / foam bumper / natural frequency 20–23 Hz — the K2500H literature already claims "Floating Body AVS," and the Hilti percussive-tool family (including US 2010/0193211, US 2010/0224383) is rich in idle-blow damping and vibration structure. This subject matter looks highly vulnerable.
• Brushless motor / battery-pack construction (cells, 40–60 A discharge, 3.0–5.0 Ah, ≤ 6 lb pack weight) — squarely US 2014/0131059.
• Crank/eccentric/connecting-rod percussion drive — squarely US 2009/0020299 A1.
• Control features (load/no-load detection, hysteresis thresholds, motor-characteristic variation) — this is the subject matter of the parent US 11,059,155, and the '155 front page cites exactly this art: US 2017/0246732 A1 (Dey, IV), US 2017/0246736 A1 (Kikuchi), US 2017/0361447 A1 (Ond), and the Pedicini publications US 2018/0055518/0055553/0338751 A1, plus EP 3184259 A1 (2017) under B25D 11/005. Caveat: the 2018 Pedicini publications post-date the 2018-01-26 priority and their § 102/§ 103 status turns on their own earlier priority dates and any common-ownership exception; I have not resolved that.

---

9. Counterarguments the patent owner will press (and their limits)

1. "The prior art is applicant's own product/admission, and the K2500H is corded." True — but the corded status is the only gap, and US 2014/0131059 fills it. More importantly, the Table's "Prior Art" label and the IDS citation of the K2500H materials are applicant admissions usable in the § 103 analysis regardless of whether the K2500H independently qualifies under § 102(a)(1)/(b)(1).
2. "The claims require a battery pack with cells up to 120 V nominal, which the corded breaker lacks." This is the one real structural difference — and it is exactly what the '059 reference supplies.
3. "Adding a battery lowers the mass ratio, so the claimed ratios are not merely 'met.'" This is the strongest point, and it is a genuine tension worth testing: the K2500H's own listed weight (27.4 kg) is heavier than the 25.0 kg "class" figure used in the '935 Table. Using 27.4 kg, the corded tool's J/kg drops to ~2.34 (below claim 1). A POSA would respond that the claim's "mass" is undefined/ambiguous (tool only? tool + pack? tool + chisel?), that the claim should be given its broadest reasonable construction, and that in any event the '935 demonstrates the performance was recoverable with only ~7–17 % tuning of blow energy — a routine optimization. This "mass" ambiguity is jointly a § 112(b) problem and a § 103 vulnerability, and it should be pinned down first in any challenge.
4. Functional-limitation argument. In the family's Appeal 2019-006201 decision on application 13/838,126 (US 2014/0131059's sibling), the Board treated a comparable power-output limitation as a functional limitation and applied In re Schreiber, 128 F.3d 1473 (Fed. Cir. 1997) — once the examiner establishes a reasonable basis that the prior art is capable of the recited function, the burden shifts to the applicant. The "≥ 85 kJ/min" and ratio limitations are amenable to the same treatment.

---

10. Caveats and verification limitations

• Provenance of two items. K2500H specifications and US 2009/0020299 A1 came from the verification pass (search), not from the Prior Art section's recovered eight. The K2500H's presence on the '155 front page is confirmed from the retrieved US 11,059,155 PDF front matter; the individual performance figures (64 J, 1300 bpm, 2,200–2,500 W, 27.4 kg, brushless, AVS) are from Milwaukee's own 2017 press materials and product listings, which corroborate the '935 Table's arithmetic rather than contradicting it.
• Dependent claims 2–13, 15–25, 27–36 are still not retrieved verbatim, so § 8 is expressly provisional.
• 9 of 17 front-page citations remain unretrieved (per the Prior Art section), and no NPL for the '935 itself was confirmed beyond the family-level K2500H materials.
• No legal conclusion is drawn. Whether any claim is invalid under § 103 is for a tribunal; this is a technical mapping and motivation analysis only.
• Identifiers are reproduced literally. No patent or application number has been auto-corrected (e.g., application 17/158,122 remains distinct from 18/158,122).

---

11. Bottom line

The single most useful takeaway: the '935's independent claims are drafted to a measured result that the applicant's own prior corded breaker already achieved (claims 1 and 14) or nearly achieved (claim 26). The obviousness case does not depend on finding a single anticipatory reference — it depends on the far more common posture where the structure is entirely old (K2500H + US 2014/0131059) and the only asserted novelty is a numerical outcome that routine optimization would produce.