Earlier this month, in the precedential decision Uniloc 2017 LLC v. Facebook Inc., the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (“the CAFC”) upheld the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“the Board”) on the issue of estoppel (or lack thereof) when multiple parties file multiple, substantially similar petitions challenging a patent’s patentability.

1) The

As discussed in Part I of this article, the scope of IPR estoppel under 35 U.S.C. § 315(e) remains unclear.  In Part II, we explore several approaches that courts may apply.

Specifically, the approaches considered herein contemplate the meaning of the phrase “reasonably could have raised” in the IPR estoppel statute.  Clearly, Congress did not

When the America Invents Act (“AIA”) first went into effect, it was widely believed by practitioners that the scope of the estoppel provisions under 35 U.S.C. § 315(e) was very broad.  Essentially, an IPR petitioner whose petition resulted in a final written determination would be estopped from arguing in district court any §§ 102 and/or

Praxair filed a first petition for inter partes review of claims 1-19 of U.S. Patent 8,846,112.  The PTAB instituted review based on the first petition and concluded that all claims, except claim 9, were unpatentable.  In doing so, the PTAB determined that the “providing information” step in claim 1, and “similarly-worded claims steps in other