Welcome to Volume 9 of our IPR-PGR Report. Please send us an email if you would like a hard copy. After 30 months of IPR practice, some trends are taking shape. Overall, the percentage of petitions put into trial has gradually decreased, down to 76% this quarter, from a high of 96% at the early stages of IPR practice. Despite that decrease, we are finding that the claims that are put into an IPR trial, after a decision to institute, are increasingly not surviving. About 85% of those claims are canceled in a Final Written Decision. Motions to Amend continue to be difficult to obtain, with only a total of 3 such motions having been granted to date. This trend has led many Petitioners to abandon any effort to obtain new claims at all, turning instead to reissue or ex parte reexamination to present fuller claim sets to the Patent Office. The always-interesting stay data from the district courts indicates that the Eastern District of Texas remains an outlier for denying motions to stay. Although motions to stay are granted, on average, 62% of the time, the EDTX has only granted about 15% of the motions brought in that district. We also note that some of these trends have triggered the Patent Office to make certain tweaks to IPR practice, with other major changes on the horizon.

Lastly, by way of a practice tip, we note the increasing frequency with which IPR petitions are being filed by companies before they enter the marketplace to eliminate blocking patents. This technique was used recently, and with great success, by one of our clients, as discussed in this IP Law360 article. Additionally, this technique was recently discussed in a Wall Street Journal article, in which we were quoted, discussing the pharmaceutical industry. Please let us know if you have any questions about this growing strategy.