Chat With The Chief On SAS Institute

As we noted in our blog post last week, the USPTO held its "Chat with the Chief on SAS" webinar on April 30, 2018, to advise the public on the implications of the Supreme Court's opinion in SAS Institute for practice before the Board going forward. The panelists were Chief Judge David Ruschke, Vice Chief Judge Tim Fink, and Vice Chief Judge Scott Weidenfeller.

The panelists noted that out of approximately 800 cases currently pending before the Board, about 18-20% have been instituted on fewer than all challenged claims. (The percentage of petitions instituted on only a subset of all challenged grounds was not available as of the date of the webinar.)

As the USPTO noted in the memo it issued last week to address SAS Institute, the Board will now issue "binary"—all-or-nothing—decisions on all pending or new IPR petitions. That is, it will either institute on all challenges raised in the petition, or on none. The panelists clarified that, at least for now, "all