Guest post by Ashton Woods, a JD candidate and member of the Juelsgaard Intellectual Property and Innovation Clinic at Stanford Law School.
This post is part of a blog post series by the Innovator Diversity Pilots Initiative (DPI), which advances inclusive innovation through rigorous research. DPI will be hosting its second conference at Emory University Law School in Atlanta on Friday, September 20, 2024. Indicate your interest by signing up here.
On February 21, the USPTO issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for Expanding Opportunities to Appear Before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), and DPI filed one of seven comments on the proposal. DPI’s full comment can be found here.
Currently, parties appearing before the PTAB who are represented by counsel must designate lead and backup counsel. Lead counsel must be a USPTO-registered practitioner, meaning that they have technical training and have passed the registration exam (commonly known as the “patent bar” exam). Backup counsel may be non-registered if they are recognized pro hac vice. Under the Proposed Rule, counsel can switch roles, with a non-registered practitioner acting as lead counsel and a registered practitioner acting as backup counsel. Additionally, parties who can show good cause, including financial hardship, can waive the backup counsel requirement, though the party’s sole counsel must still be a registered practitioner. Finally, the Proposed Rule streamlines the pro hac vice recognition process for non-registered practitioners, though they still must be accompanied by a registered practitioner in the lead or backup role.
As explained in more detail in the full comment, DPI views the Proposed Rule as a modest step toward reducing the accessibility gap for potential patentees, patent practitioners, and patent challengers. The goal of the Proposed Rule is laudable, and it may provide a solid foundation for future efforts to diversify the Patent Bar and the patent system more broadly—if it can effectively expand the pool of eligible practitioners in proceedings before the PTAB, the Proposed Rule may support wider USPTO efforts to increase the participation of underrepresented communities in the innovation ecosystem.