In Vicor Corp. v. Synqor, Inc., [2016-2283] (August 30, 2017) the Federal Circuit affirmed in part, vacated in part, and remanded the Board’s decisions in two reexaminations, one in which the Board found that certain claims of U.S. Patent No. 8,023,290 are patentable; and one in which the Board found certain claims of U.S. Patent No. 7,272,021 unpatentable as anticipated or obvious.

The Federal Circuit found that despite sharing a common panel and having opinions issued on the same date, the decisions in the respective reexaminations contain inconsistent findings on identical issues and on essentially the same record.  With respect to the ‘290 patent reexamination, the Federal Circuit said that the Board improperly analyzed the obviousness arguments under only one of the four Graham factors when it looked exclusively at the objective evidence, without considering the remaining factors and the relative strength of the factors.  The Federal Circuit further said that the Board reached inconsistent conclusions as to the evidentiary weight to be given to the secondary considerations evidence presented in the respective reexaminations of the ’290 and ’021 patents, without any explanation to justify such inconsistency.

The Federal Circuit said that the Board’s legal error with respect to the ‘290 patent is underscored by its opinion issued on the same day in the related reexamination of the ’021 patent, where the Board applied all four Graham factors in the ’021’s reexamination and stated that “[t]he Federal Circuit has determined that only after considering the four Graham criteria together can the decision maker make the legal determination of whether the invention is nonobvious.”

The Federal Circuit said that in the ’290’s reexamination, the Board found the objective evidence to be so persuasive that it approved of the examiner’s decision to withdraw rejections without analyzing the remaining Graham factors and without considering Federal Circuit decisions on related claims.  In the ’021’s reexamination, however, the Board determined that the objective evidence principally related to features of the claims that were found to be anticipated in other cases and, therefore, found that there was no nexus between the objective evidence and the claims of the ’021 patent.  The Federal Circuit concluded that Board’s decisions do not evince any explanation or justification for these inconsistent findings, given the similarity between the claims at issue in the respective reexaminations.

The Federal Circuit said that not every instance of an agency reaching inconsistent outcomes in similar, related cases will necessarily be erroneous, but concluded that the inconsistent application of the Graham factors in two cases reaching different results required that the cases be vacated and remanded.