Abusive Petition Practices Effectively Controlled by PTAB

Once upon a time, the Patent Trial & Appeal Board (PTAB) accepted AIA trial petitions that attacked a subject patent in a serial fashion.  That is, typically, a group of defendants of a multi-defendant suit  would stagger their filings against a subject patent. For example, Company A would file first, after seeing the Patent Owner’s Preliminary Response to Company A, Company B would file, and then after the Board issued its Decision to Institute relative to Company A’s petition, Company C would file.  In this way, each succeeding petition could improve over the first filed petition and increase the likelihood that the patent would be cancelled. This was not fair, and to the agency’s credit, once this strategy became clear, it was shut down.

With the issuance of the General Plastics decision, as any practitioner would attest, a serial petition strategy has become near impossible.  But that hasn’t stopped PTAB critics from claiming the practice somehow still exists.
Continue Reading PTAB Debunks Multiple Petition Criticisms in Newly Released Statistics