Inter Partes Review Statistics

By Jason Rantanen

This post summarizes data on inter partes review proceedings and appeals from the Patent Office.  Although the office publishes a monthly Patent Trial and Appeal Board Statistics packet, the narratives contained within that packet can create confusion as discussed in Michael Sander’s guest post earlier this year.  Below are some of the charts that I’ve developed based on the publicly available information to attempt to get a better handle on what’s going on in terms of case flow and outcome.

As you look at these charts, keep in mind the temporal issues associated with IPR proceedings.  Once a petition is filed, it typically takes about six months before an institution decision is made.*  If a petition is instituted, it will be about a year (and sometimes more) before the trial decision.  Thus, very few petitions filed in the last four months or so will have reached the point of institution decisions, and nearly all trial decisions issued in the last few months relate to petitions filed over a year (and probably around 18 months) ago.  Appeals of trial outcomes will be filed within 2-3 months depending on whether a rehearing is requested.

The consequence of this is that each successive piece of information relates to an earlier time period.  The institution rates shown in the first graph relate to the petitions filed about 5-7 months earlier; the trial outcomes shown in the second graph relate to petitions filed about 18 months earlier (and instituted about 12 months earlier), and the appeal numbers relate to trial outcomes from about 2-3 months earlier (with the additional caveat that these are all appeals from the Patent Office, not just appeals from IPRs).  These sequences are approximations, but they’re important in understanding the relationship between filed petitions, institution rates, trial outcomes and appeals.

Finally, note that at each stage, some percentage of the cases continuing on after the earlier stage will drop out due to settlement or for other reasons (such as joinders at the institution stage).  Thinking of the data as an inverted pyramid might be helpful.

Petitions Filed and Institution Decisions

Petition filing and institution rate data indicates that both the rate of filing and rate of institution have plateaued.  Since June of 2014, the number of new petitions filed each month has ranged between 96 and 184, with most quarters falling between about 400 and 450 new filings.  The fourth quarter of 2015 and the first quarter of 2016 did see a drop, though, so perhaps we’ve seen the peak of IPR petition filings.

Trial Outcomes

The most interesting thing to note about the above graph of trial outcomes, which I created based on the differences reported in the monthly statistical reports issued by the PTO, might be that recent months have seen a fall in the percentage of trials in which all claims were held unpatentable.  In March 2016, for example, while 40 trials resulted in all claims held unpatentable, twenty-one resulted in no claims held unpatentable.  And in May and June, only a bit over 50% of the trials resulted in all claims held unpatentable.

Appeals

The below chart depicts the numbers of appeals docketed at the Federal Circuit arising from the PTO, the District Courts, and the International Trade Commission.  It illustrates a dramatic rise in the number of appeals from the PTO, with the number projected to surpass the number of appeals arising from the district courts this year.  It’s use in assessing IPR proceedings is limited due to the fact that the data does not differentiate between appeals from IPR proceedings and other appeals from the PTO.    I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who’s done the detailed breakdown of these appeals to know whether the standard hypothesis–that this rise is mainly due to appeals from IPR proceedings–is correct.

*These numbers are based on the PTO’s own timeline, see 77 Fed. Reg. 48757 (Aug. 14, 2012), and data from LexMachina indicating the median time to institution decision is currently 185 days, and the median time to final decision is currently 540 days.