The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), sitting en
banc, has decided that the statutory phrase "served with a
complaint" – which appears in a time bar provision
regarding Inter Partes Review (IPR) means, quite simply:
served with a complaint. The statute is not concerned with any
effect, or lack of effect, of such service of a complaint. Nor is
the statute concerned with what happens after a complaint has been
served. The fact that service of a complaint happened is all that
matters. Surprisingly, the correctness of this seemingly simple
conclusion has been unsettled for nearly six years after enactment
of the America Invents Act in September 2012. In Click-To-Call
Technologies, LP v. Ingenio, Inc., No. 2015-1242 (Fed. Cir.,
Aug. 16, 2018) (en banc) ("the CTC case"), the CAFC
decided that simple words have simple meanings, a relief to
litigants, practitioners, observers, and scholars who have long
wondered how the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the
