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Post grant patent proceedings at the USPTO, such as ex parte and inter partes Reexamination are becoming increasingly favored tools to combat patents of questionable validity. Likewise, some of these same Reexamination tools can also serve as mechanisms to defend and/or focus the scope of pioneering patent portfolios.
The emerging popularity of Reexamination stems from two factors, the first is the recent creation of the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) within the USPTO. While the use of reexamination by third party requesters was quite modest in the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of requests since that time. The emerging popularity of reexamination stems in part from the recent creation of a Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) within the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). CRU Examiners, all of whom are hand-picked experienced primary patent examiners who work in three person teams and handle only reexamination proceedings. Thus, the quality of reexamined patents has increased based on the CRU team approach, and the speed of reexaminations has improved.
The second factor is the increased willingness of some Federal District Courts to stay a patent litigation in the face of an initiated Reexamination. Read the rest of this entry »
