On September 25, 2025, Whitney Meier Howard and Justine Kawa published “Discretionary denials: lessons from the first 6 months of Coke Morgan Stewart’s USPTO Direction” in Westlaw Today. The following is an excerpt:
In March 2025, Acting Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Coke Morgan Stewart implemented a new, bifurcated process for evaluating whether to institute inter partes review (IPR) or post-grant review (PGR) patent challenges with the goal of improving efficiency and reducing workload at the USPTO.
The Director now first evaluates whether the IPR or PGR petition should be denied for discretionary reasons before the merits of the patent challenge are evaluated by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). As explained below, the many Director decisions that have issued in the last six months indicate that patentees and petitioners need to think strategically and creatively about their arguments.
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