After President Donald Trump took office in January, the US Patent and Trademark Office rolled out a series of changes to the inter partes reviews process. Instead of review before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), challenges are now filtered through an approve-or-deny decision by the agency’s director before any review on the merits.
“Patent practitioners will be fine. They can do district court litigation and have more billable hours in the aggregate,” Bracewell’s Kit Crumbley, a former PTAB judge who practices before the tribunal, told Bloomberg Law. “It’s the system and the litigants that’ll be worse off.”
