“How long will my case take to get to trial?” This is one of the first questions asked when contemplating or responding to litigation, and the answer is critical to many strategic decisions during the course of litigation, such as:

• Client budgets
• Parallel PTAB proceedings
• Stays of litigation
• Transfers of venue
• Fintiv discretionary denials of PTAB institution (especially under the new guidance)

Yet, the answer is not always straightforward. Different types of cases progress at different paces and there may be significant variance in schedules among different judges. There are also important differences in how external factors, such as natural disasters, pandemic-driven court closures, or shifts in case filings prompted by landmark changes in the law, impact different courts and judges.

Docket Navigator’s new Time to Trial tool lets you slice and dice the data to focus on cases and circumstances most closely resembling yours. Here are a few examples:

• Focus on specific courts or judges
• Optionally exclude windows of time where case schedules were not typical due to temporary external factors
• Optionally exclude cases with unusual schedules (cases involving transfers of venue, stays, consolidations, and statistical outliers)
• Focus on cases of similar size and complexity

The Time to Trial tool is accessed through the main search page in the Analytics section.

To learn more about how the new PTAB guidance affects trial timelines, keep reading the article recently published by our partner, IAM.

27 June 2022

In new guidance about Fintiv and discretionary denials, USPTO Director Kathi Vidal has told administrative patent judges to consider median time-to-trial statistics when they’re deciding whether a US district court trial will take place sooner than statutory deadlines for post-grant reviews.

Docket Navigator keeps detailed statistics on time-to-trial in the US’s busiest patent courts and we took a look to compare them to the PTAB’s timelines for deciding inter partes reviews.

The board’s Fintiv precedent calls on the board to issue a discretionary denial of an IPR with parallel district court litigation in which the judge has scheduled a trial prior to the board’s deadline to decide the review. The provision has been criticised by some in the patent community, as well as in Congress, They take issue with the board’s over-reliance on district court timetables which often get delayed, with trials happening much later than the PTAB could have decided an IPR.

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