The PTAB recently stood firm in denying a petitioner's
motion to change the filing dates of two IPR petitions that missed
a statutory deadline by less than ten minutes. Case IPR2016-00281
and IPR2016-00282 (Patents 8,603,514 B2 and 8,017,150 B2). The
petitioner, Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc., was facing a 1-year
statutory IPR filing deadline of December 3, 2015, set by a
complaint alleging patent infringement served on Teva a year
earlier.
A legal assistant handling the IPR filings started filing the
IPR petitions at 11:11 pm on December 3, 2015, after facing
technical difficulties with an unrelated petition that the legal
assistant filed first that evening. The technical difficulties
continued while the legal assistant was filing the Teva petitions.
These technical difficulties included slow processing, frozen
screens, and rejected payments. The USPTO Patent Review Processing
System ("PRPS") eventually issued filing notifications
for the two IPR petitions at 12:01