United States: Director Lee Comments On The Fifth Anniversary Of The America Invents Act

The AIA also created a new Patent Trial and Appeal Board and new post-grant proceedings to provide a faster, lower cost alternative to district court litigation to test the validity of a patent. Since its inception, the Board received ~5,500 petitions for its new post-grant proceedings–that's more than 3x number expected. And the Board did this without missing single statutory deadline, while also maintaining a respectable affirmance rate before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The PTAB proceedings are helping to ensure that the patents in our system are the ones that should be; and those that should not, are not. With a total of over 270 judges—123 of them added since the Board's inception—the Agency is faithfully meeting Congress's mandate And, importantly, looks forward to continuing to do so through further well-reasoned rulings and enhancements to our proceedings to make them even more fair and effective within our statutory authority. That's a success story, not just for patent stakeholders but also the quality of our patents more broadly in our system.