"Stewart told Quinn that she felt 'right out of the gate [after the AIA], we got off on the wrong foot with discretionary denials.'... The petitions were treated as if they were going to be instituted unless the patent owner could prove why they shouldn't be... 'Patent owners were already behind before the proceeding started. We just tried to level the playing field.'"
"Stewart recalled that at the start of her tenure as Acting Director she was particularly 'dismayed at the state of the Office,' especially workforce issues. With six empty buildings (two of which are now occupied by the National Science Foundation), Stewart said the campus felt neglected and empty, so efforts to get employees back to the office dominated her team's time and attention for those first few months. While Stewart said they are in a better place now than they were, and a sense of community is developing again, it is 'still just a shadow of our former self.'"
"With respect to PTAB changes, one of Stewart's first major policy shifts was to rescind former USPTO Director Kathi Vidal's 2022 memo, titled " Interim Procedure for Discretionary Denials in AIA Post-Grant Proceedings with Parallel District Court Litigation," and to implement her own approach, titled " Interim Processes for PTAB Workload Management." That process has been expanded under Squires and includes the somewhat controversial concept of discret"
The USPTO implemented procedural changes at the PTAB, rescinding the 2022 memo on discretionary denials and instituting interim workload management processes. The new approach aims to address a perceived institutional bias that treated petitions as likely to be instituted unless patent owners disproved them. The changes encourage patent owners to present full factual narratives and urge petitioners to focus on patents needing clear error correction. Early administrative efforts prioritized addressing workforce shortfalls and repopulating underused campus buildings, with ongoing work to rebuild community and operational capacity. The workload management practices expanded under current leadership include controversial discretionary-denial concepts.
Read at IPWatchdog.com | Patents & Intellectual Property Law
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