Post-AIT Review of Real Party in Interest Decisions

Throughout the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (“PTAB”) history, patent owners have tried to leverage a petitioner’s alleged failure to name all real parties-in-interest (“RPIs”) as a way to achieve denial of an inter partes review (“IPR”) petition or trial termination. The effectiveness of those efforts has ebbed and flowed. Initially, some PTAB panels viewed naming of RPIs as a jurisdictional requirement, concluding that RPI-naming errors were not fixable after the 35 U.S.C. § 315(b) one-year bar. Petitioners could lose their petition filing date based on RPI missteps, resulting in then untimely petitions.

Later decisions backed away from that hardline stance, finding that some RPI errors made without deceptive intent were fixable. Regardless, petitioners are tasked with identifying RPIs to the best of their ability.