The Federal Circuit hears seven patent appeals on Monday, November 2, before two panels sitting at 10 a.m. The full lineup is on the Federal Circuit argument calendar - a tool I am testing in alpha.

Eight en banc petitions are pending at the Federal Circuit, though two are pro se. The court makes pretty quick work of petitions and so the list has turned over almost completely since my July post.

The wait for a first action on the merits (FAOM) has eased a bit over the past year, but the numbers are still about seven months over target. Most recently, the average application waited about 21 ...

I’m excited to announce my new book – Building the Internet We Want: Law for a Connected World, which is now available via Amazon (Hardcover $29 or Kindle $13)! Internet law has changed so quickly ...

I have been looking at patent applications that appear to be lost within the USPTO digital files. A common pattern is abandonment, followed by revival on petition, but then the file is apparently ...

In my post on Monday, I created a time series chart showing the average/median wait time for utility patent applications from filing to the first action on the merits. But, that office-wide average ...

Range of Motion's cert petition, due Dec. 21, will challenge the plainly dissimilar test and judicial functionality findings for design patents.

In December 2025, Director Squires invited applicants to begin filing special Rule 132 declarations focused on patent eligibility. He called these Subject Matter Eligibility Declarations, or SMEDs.

I started pulling at a loose bristle this week and ended up doing a deep dive into the history of the American toothbrush. I came across a Library of Congress explanation that H.N. Wadsworth of ...

I have been parsing ex parte PTAB decisions - about 130 k for this post running from 2009 through September 2026 - looking particularly at the eligibility cases. The short version: eligibility is ...

This is an update to my September post on the Supreme Court's patent docket. The big news is the denial of certiorari in the IPR discretionary denial case of Google LLC v. VirtaMove, Corp., No.

I’m hoping Mizzou will be able to field a team in the newly announced PTAB moot court competition in Spring 2027, offered in collaboration with Indiana University Maurer School of Law. Each team will ...