Editor’s note: This post is the first in a series relating to the Diversity Pilots Initiative, a project co-organized by Professors Margo Bagley & Colleen Chien along with Professor Jillian Grennan that seeks to advance inclusive innovation through rigorous research. The preview blog in the series is here and resources from the first conference of the initiative, co-organized with the USPTO are available here. Below, Professor Bagley introduces herself, the project, and the series. – Jason Rantanen

By: Margo A. Bagley, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law, co-inventor, and Principal, Diversity Pilots Initiative. Watch her video for Invent Together, entitled Challenges Encountered as a Diverse Inventor.

In addition to being Associate Dean for Research and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law, I am an African-American woman, co-inventor on two patents, patent attorney and law professor, author of numerous articles, chapters, and books on patent law, and advisor on patent issues to governments and international organizations. And yet, it is my firsthand experience, as a member of groups that have been systematically underrepresented and overlooked in the innovation ecosystem, that gives me a deep understanding and resolve to champion diversity and inclusion in innovation and led me to co-organize, with Professor Colleen Chien and personnel from the USPTO, the first Innovator Diversity Pilots conference held at Santa Clara Law School on November 18, 2022. (video recordings and slides available here.) This blog post, and others to follow in the series, will highlight practices that have been or will be tried, tested and evaluated to increase diversity in innovation.

According to the USPTO, women represent over 50% of the workforce and 27% of STEM workers, but  comprise only 13% of inventors on patents. Moreover, while black inventors have made profound contributions to technological advances in America, it is estimated that from 1970 to 2006, black American inventors received six patents per million people, compared to 235 patents per million for all U.S. inventors.  These statistics provided part of the impetus for the conference, which was co-organized by the USPTO and co-sponsored by the law schools of Santa Clara University and Emory University, the Intellectual Property Owners Association, the US Intellectual Property Alliance, the National Academy of Inventors, the Institute for Progress, the Association of University Technology Managers, Meta, the Institute for IP and Social Justice, Finnegan, and Schwegman Lundberg & Woessner.

The conference focused on piloting: temporarily introducing new practices to learn from, combined with rigorous research methods to evaluate their effectiveness.  The day comprised a lively mixture of “Firestarter” presentations describing pilots already completed or underway, along with academic “pitches” — proposals for new pilots across a range of entities and at a variety of points along the innovation timeline. It also included a thought-provoking keynote address by Professor John List (author of the Voltage Effect) (video), exploring the importance of successful scaling of pilots to achieve measurable results, and a fireside chat with dynamic USPTO Director Kathi Vidal whose unparalleled commitment to increasing the participation of members of underrepresented groups in the patenting process is already well underway and bearing fruit. (video)

An underlying theme of the conference was the important realization that growing the percentage of Americans of all backgrounds participating in the innovation system is not only the right thing to do, it is also critical to global economic competitiveness for the United States. For many who are aware of the dismal statistics cited above but are unsure of how to impact them, the conference provided (and through its preserved recordings still provides) an empowering opportunity to identify measurable, deployable ways to pilot low risk interventions.  It also facilitated the fostering of a community of practice, the bolstering of an evidence base for what works (and, importantly, what does not), all of which can inform policy and regulatory efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in innovation and invention.

Segments explored the why and how of diversity piloting, including the case for diversity in innovation and for rigorously piloting ways of advancing it.  Firestarters described, inter alia, diversity nudges and ways of addressing organizational barriers to diversity in the innovation ecosystem such as the measurable success of opt-out vs. opt-in invention disclosure systems; affinity group creation and support in the USPTO; the PTAB LEAP program (granting 15 additional minutes of argument to a party that allows a junior associate to participate in oral advocacy); and a “moneyball”-like fellowship program successful in bringing back into the legal profession more than 200 women who left it to raise children. Pitches covered attribution practices at the Office, mentorship, and adapting the diversity pledge to the legal academy. (video)

An intrinsic feature of the conference was its effectiveness in lifting up several successful initiatives already underway, as well as resources available to stakeholders seeking where or how to begin.  It built on and featured important early efforts like the USIPA Increasing Diversity in Innovation Pledge, signed by over 50 leading companies, the USPTO Council for Inclusive Innovation (CI2), IPO Diversity in IP Toolkit, and the Santa Clara Diversity in Innovation Best Practices Guide.

Important law firm and corporate initiatives highlighted at the conference during Session 5 include Adapt.legal’s mentorship and DEI program resources, Schwegman Lundberg & Woessner’s SLW Academy providing a comprehensive set of free patent training videos, as well as Harrity & Harrity’s multi-pronged approach to increasing innovator and patent practitioner diversity and capacity, including the Harrity Academy and Patent Pathways programs (volunteer here).  We hope at future conferences to feature even more of the work that these and other firms are doing that often is insufficiently publicized and lauded.

The conference also provided opportunities for sharing personal reflections.  Colleen Chien (the mastermind of the conference and diversity piloting approach) and I together shared ways that technical fields have provided opportunities for the advancement of women and people of color in our own families and journeys, but also stereotypes and roadblocks that may stymie progress.  We both found encouraging the variety of approaches presented during the day that bode well for the patent system’s ability to facilitate personal advancement for more Americans from all walks of life, while advancing our national interest in technological progress. (video presentation, slides)

Students in a Patent Law course I taught at Harvard Law School were assigned to watch a 1.5-hour conference segment of their choosing and write a short reaction paper on their impressions.  Their reactions were fascinating, featuring words like “shocking”, surprising”, “moving”, “jarring”, “heartening”, “wonderful”, “compelling”, “hopeful”, and “amazing”, and often linking what they heard in the conference pitches to their own lived experiences in research ecosystems prior to law school.

The second Innovator Diversity Pilots conference being planned for 2024 at Emory University School of Law, will build on the success and momentum of this first conference and will provide an opportunity to report learnings from pilots launched and/or continued in the interim.  Please check out the conference recordings and resources, stay tuned for future blog posts, and drop us a line to let us know how we can uplift your effective practices for increasing diversity in innovation too! (diversitypilots@gmail.com)

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By Jason Rantanen

It’s time for the January 2023 Federal Circuit statistics update! As I’ve done for the last few years, below I provide some statistics on what the Federal Circuit has been doing over the past year. These charts draw on the Federal Circuit Dataset Project, an open-access dataset that I maintain that contains information on all Federal Circuit decisions and docketed appeals.  While previous versions of the dataset have been limited to merits decisions, this year we began including non-merits terminations as well.  Currently, all non-merits terminations from 2022 are included in the dataset.  We’ll be working backwards to add terminations from earlier years.

One of my goals with this dataset is to make it publicly accessible so that anyone can use it in their own research. A complete copy of this year’s release is archived at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/CAFC_Dataset_Project.  In addition, you can access the dataset through a user interface via https://empirical.law.uiowa.edu and generate your own subsets and graphs. A copy of the codebook is available at these locations as well. In addition, if you are a researcher who would like help using the dataset, please reach out to me – I’m happy to help out.

Onto the data!

Decision Numbers and Origins

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows the number of Federal Circuit opinions and Rule 36 summary affirmances by origin since 2010. These represent individual documents (i.e.: a single opinion or Rule 36) rather than docket numbers (which is how the Federal Circuit reports its metrics).

Once again, the highest number of merits decisions arose from the PTO. Overall, however, there was a substantial drop in the number of merits decisions: 532 in 2022, as compared with 643 in 2021.  Decisions from all origins actually dropped slightly, but the biggest drop was in the number of decisions arising from the PTO was the main reason: 147 in 2022 as compared with 216 in 2021. The direct cause of fewer decisions isn’t a mystery: as shown below, there was a big drop in appeals docketed at the Federal Circuit in 2021. Fewer appeals means fewer appellate decisions.

Opinions vs. Summary Affirmances

Figure 2

Figure 2 shows the number of opinions versus Rule 36 summary affirmances arising from the District Courts and PTO. In terms of absolute numbers, the court issued the fewest Rule 36 summary affirmances in appeals arising from these origins in several years.  In relative terms, 21% of the decisions arising from the district courts were disposed of through a summary affirmance while 42% of the Federal Circuit’s decisions arising from the PTO were summary affirmances.

What about the type of opinion that the court is issuing? For precedential opinions, Figure 3 shows that this is one area in which things are about the same as last year: the court issued slightly more precedential decisions arising from the district courts than in 2021 (52 vs. 47), and slightly fewer precedential decisions arising from the district courts (29 vs. 33). Rather, the drop in decisions arising from the PTO mostly manifested in terms of fewer nonprecedential opinions.

Figure 3

What about compared to the court’s overall decisions?  The number of precedential opinions issued by the court in 2022 was almost exactly the same as in 2021: 162 in 2022 as compared with 164 in 2021. But it is a drop from 2014-2020. (Note that this figure does not include Rule 36 summary affirmances).

Figure 4

General dispositions

Figure 5

In contrast with 2021, at which the Federal Circuit affirmed district court decisions relatively frequently (79%), in 2022 the court affirmed-in-full in appeals from the district courts just 57% of the time. Even including partial affirmances, the rate was lower than in recent years: it affirmed in full or part just 75% of the time. (The purple line indicates the average 68% affirmance rate over the 12-year time period). As a reminder, these graphs do not include petitions for writs of mandamus. In contrast, the court continued to affirm the PTO’s decisions at about the same rate as it has in recent years, affirming in full in 78% of its decisions.

Docketed Appeals

Figure 6 shows the number of docketed appeals by origin. These are are appeals filed at the Federal Circuit — the precursor to any decisions.  As Figure 6 shows, there was a substantial drop-off in appeals filed in 2021, followed by an increase in appeals filed in 2022, especially in appeals from the district courts (339 appeals filled in 2022 as compared with 286 appeals in 2021) and from the PTO (489 appeals filed in 2022 as compared with 402 appeals filed in 2021). Given what happened in appeals this year, I’d expect an increase in Federal Circuit decisions in 2023, recognizing that it takes about 13 months on average from filing to decision.

Figure 6

In addition to providing a picture of what’s being filed at the Federal Circuit, the docket dataset also allows us to match up the Federal Circuit decisions to other datasets of district court and PTO data, such as the USPTO Patent Litigation dataset and the Stanford NPE Litigation Dataset. If you’re interested in doing a deep dive into these areas, my research team and I used this data in a few papers this year:

• Jason Rantanen, Missing Decisions and the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, 170 U. Pa L. Rev. Online (2022)
• Jason Rantanen, Charles Neff, Eweosa Owenaze & Allison Wiliamson, Who Appeals (and Wins) Patent Infringement Cases, 60 Houston L. Rev. 289 (2022) and
• Jason Rantanen, “Studying Patent Infringement Litigation,” Research Handbook on Empirical studies in Intellectual Property Law, Estelle Derclaye, ed. (Edward Elgar forthcoming) (preprint available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4194142).

Miscellaneous Dockets

One category of data that is not included in the above graphs is the data on petitions for writs of mandamus and petitions for permission to appeal. As in past years, nearly all of the miscellaneous matters consisted of Petitions for Writs of Mandamus, with a few Petitions for Permission to Appeal.  Figure 7 shows the numbers of dispositions of petitions for writs of mandamus over time.

Figure 7

In 2022, the court granted in whole or part 11 petitions for a writ of mandamus; fewer than 2021 (18), but at just as high a rate (42%). As in past years, the grants arise exclusively from petitions arising from the district courts.   Jonas Anderson, Paul Gugliuzza & I talk about this in more depth in Extraordinary Writ or Ordinary Remedy: Mandamus at the Federal Circuit, 100 Wash. U. L. Rev. 327 (2022)  

Additional terminations

Beginning in February 2022, the Federal Circuit began making all terminations of appeals available on its website. This is a terrific decision and is responsive to concerns about “missing” decisions that Merritt McAlister and I have each written about. That said, as I wrote about in my examination of the Federal Circuit’s decisions, the Federal Circuit has historically done a pretty good job most making merits decisions (i.e.: “Opinions” and “Rule 36” summary affirmances) available on its website, so many of these additional terminations consist of appeals that are dismissed pursuant to Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 42(b). I supplemented what was on the court’s website with a collection of the additional January and February 2022 terminations from PACER, so all of the terminations for 2022 are in there.

Using data about these decisions, I was able to put together a graph showing how these appeals were disposed of. This graph differs a bit from the Federal Circuit’s own statistics because it’s by document rather than docket number, and (2) it is for the calendar year rather than the fiscal year. The purpose is to provide a sense of what happens to appeals other than those that result in merits decisions.

Figure 8

Close to 2/3rds of appeal terminations occurred in the context of an opinion (49%) or Rule 36 summary affirmance (14%). Most of the remainder were dismissals (32%). Of the dismissals, 63% were voluntary withdrawals (generally under to FRAP 42(b)). The remaining dismissals are for a variety of reasons, but typically due to a failure to prosecute the appeal, failure to appeal within the relevant time period, or lack of appellate subject matter jurisdiction.

To download the data for yourself, visit the dataverse or go to http://empirical.law.uiowa.edu. I’ve also saved a copy of my Excel workbook with the graphs on the Dataverse archive. It contains the specific parameters that I used to generate these graphs.

By Sarah Burstein, Professor of Law at Suffolk University Law School.

Columbia Sportswear North America, Inc. v. Seirus Innovative Accessories, Inc., 21-2299 (submitted but not decided) (oral argument recording available here)

The Federal Circuit heard oral arguments yesterday in the second round of Columbia v. Seirus. (Prior Patently-O coverage of this appeal is available here.) My 2015 article, The Patented Design, was mentioned several times during the argument.

In that article, I argued that a design patent’s scope should be limited to the design as applied to a specific type of product. In making that argument, I acknowledged that this approach could create some line-drawing problems, including the type that have arisen in Columbia v. Seirus. I suggested that, with respect to infringement:

[O]ne solution would be to put the burden of proof on the patent owner to show that the accused device should be considered the same type of product. Courts have been tasked with determining which products are and are not the same “type” of product in the trademark context; there is no obvious reason why they should not be able to do the same in the design patent context.

If, however, the line-drawing problem proves to be intractable, an alternative would be to determine product “types” according to the Locarno Agreement Establishing an International Classification for Industrial Designs. Specifically, “type of product” could be defined to map onto Locarno sub-classes. For example, Locarno Class 10 includes subclasses for “Clocks and Alarm Clocks,” “Watches and Wrist Watches,” and “Other Time-Measuring Instruments.” The Locarno classification system is not perfect for this use but it may provide a second-best solution if judicial common law development proves unworkable.

Sarah Burstein, The Patented Design, 83 Tenn. L. Rev. 161, 219–20 (2015) (footnotes omitted). So my argument was not that design patent scope (and in this case, the scope of comparison prior art) must be limited to the exact, specific type of article named expressly in the verbal portion of the design patent claim.

Instead, I argued that courts should look to whether the accused product (or reference) is the same general type of article.

I also suggested that the product type could be determined with reference to Locarno sub-classes. How might that work in practice?

Looking at the dispute in Columbia v. Seirus, the most relevant class would seem to be Class 5, “Textile piece goods, artificial and natural sheet material.” Here are the relevant class subheadings:

So which subclass(es) would apply here? This case is an example of how the “substantial latitude” that design patent applicants are given in describing the relevant article in their claim language, see MPEP § § 1503.01(I), might sometimes complicate later attempts at classification.

The asserted design patent, U.S. Patent No. D657,093, claims “the ornamental design of a heat reflective material.” The only Class 5 subclass heading that uses the word “material” is 05-06, “Artificial or Natural Sheet Material.” But the patented design seems to be directed more to something like the examples mentioned in subclass 05-05, “Textile Fabric.” (Indeed, if you look closer at the full Locarno Classification, subclass 05-05 specifically includes ID No. 100480, “Insulating fabrics.”)

So which bucket would the D’093 fit in best? Where classification is disputed, the burden of persuasion should be on whichever party wants to prove something is the same type of product.

For infringement, then, the patent owner should have to prove the accused product is the same type as what is claimed. For comparison prior art, the accused infringer should have to prove the reference is the proper type. (This is because the use of the prior art in evaluating infringement is a one-way ratchet; it can only be used to narrow the presumptive scope of a claim, not to enlarge it. See Sarah Burstein, Is Design Patent Examination Too Lax?, 33 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 607, 612 (2018).)

Evidence relevant to this inquiry could include information about any commercial embodiments, including information the patent owner has provided to regulators about their product or market. And if a patent owner has registered their design internationally, the design may already have a Locarno sub-class.

Who should decide? Judges would be well-suited to make these types of determinations. Indeed, these issues are likely to arise at the Markman stage or, as in Columbia v. Seirus, in motions in limine. This is not the kind of credibility or historical-facts determination that we normally leave to juries. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine a way to effectively instruct juries on this issue without injecting undue confusion into the infringement analysis.

By: Colleen V. Chien, Professor of Law, Santa Clara University School of Law and Margo A. Bagley, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research, Emory Law School and Hieken Visiting Professor in Patent Law, Harvard Law School (visiting Fall 2022) 

Link for more Information and to Register for the Conference

Growing the percentage of Americans of all backgrounds participating in the innovation system is not only the right thing to do, it is also critical to global economic competitiveness for the United States. But currently,  while women represent over 50% of the workforce and 27% of STEM workers, they comprise only 13% of inventors, according to the USPTO’s influential Progress and Potential report.  A growing number of stakeholders are actively experimenting with ways to narrow these and other innovator-inventor gaps* in participation and diversify the profession. We invite you to participate in our inaugural Innovator Diversity Pilots Conference, which will build on efforts like the USIPA Increasing Diversity in Innovation Pledge, signed by over 50 leading companies, USPTO Council for Inclusive Innovation (CI2), IPO Diversity in IP Toolkit, and Santa Clara Diversity in Innovation Best Practices Guide, to foster a community of practice, bolster the evidence base for what works, and inform policy and regulatory efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in innovation and invention.

Our focus on piloting – temporarily introducing new practices to learn from them – and rigorous research methods like field experiments to evaluate effectiveness underscores that the work of diversity and inclusion is hard and requires not only a focus on results, but also iteration, refinement, humility, and collaboration.

Featuring keynote remarks by USPTO Director Kathi Vidal and Professor John List (author of the Voltage Effect), the event is co-organized by the USPTO and co-sponsored by the law schools of Santa Clara University and Emory University, the Intellectual Property Owners Association, the US Intellectual Property Alliance, the National Academy of Inventors, the Institute for Progress, the Association for University Technology Managers, Meta, the Institute for IP and Social Justice, and Schwegman Lundberg & Woessner.

This year’s all-day event will take place on Friday November 18, 2022 in-person at Santa Clara University and on-line. Remote participation is free and the program will feature the following sessions:

• The Why and How of Diversity Piloting – the case for diversity in innovation and rigorously piloting ways of advancing it, presented in part by leading economist and MacArthur Fellow Heidi Williams.
• Getting People off the Bench – Learning from Doing – companies, researchers, and the USPTO will report on diversity nudges, affinity groups, and other practices for engaging and developing diverse talent.
• Getting the Data and Tools Needed to Make Progress – how data and tools can be used, in privacy-respecting ways, to advance diversity in innovation and invention.
• Innovator Diversity Policy Pilots – initiatives at the university, agency, state, and federal, levels to develop and use evidence to advance broad-based economic growth through greater participation and inclusion in innovation and inventing.

Fireside Chat with USPTO Director Kathi Vidal:  “USPTO Diversity Initiatives Changing the Innovation Ecosystem”

• Let’s Pilot Together – conference participants will draw upon research, their experience, and the proceedings to “pitch” the USPTO and other sponsoring organizations with their ideas for piloting regarding, for example, attribution practices at the Office, mentorship, and adapting the diversity pledge to the academy.
• Diversity in the Profession and Pipeline – discussion of existing and emerging initiatives and approaches like the Council for Inclusive Innovation (CI2), Patent Pipeline Program, LEAP, and the Mansfield Rule for supporting diversity in the legal profession and beyond.

Background resources and background materials are available here. We have designed the day to be informative, educational, and interactive. We hope you will join us, online or in-person.

*The Gender Innovator-Inventor Gap (source: Redefining Progress and the Case for Diversity in Innovation and Inventing) 

Link for more Information and to Register

Updated to reflect additional co-sponsors.

By Paul R. Gugliuzza, Professor of Law, Temple University Beasley School of Law

The Federal Circuit decides lots of mandamus petitions on transfer of venue under 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a). Most federal courts of appeals decide one or two per year, at most. The Federal Circuit, in 2021 alone, decided 30.

Yet the Federal Circuit rarely designates those decisions as precedent. Over 85% of the court’s venue mandamus decisions since 2008 have been nonprecedential. And, it’s worth noting, the Federal Circuit’s few precedential decisions are wildly unrepresentative: nearly 80% of them grant mandamus, even though, overall, petitioners succeed less than a third of the time.

In an order issued earlier this month, District Judge Alan Albright—who, despite recent changes in how cases are assigned to judges in his district, still has twice as many patent cases on his docket as any judge in the country—picked up this thread about the proliferation of nonprecedential Federal Circuit transfer decisions.

In Motion Offense v. Google, the patentee, who opposed transfer, argued that Judge Albright should follow Fifth Circuit case law on transfer of venue—and ignore the nonprecedential Federal Circuit decisions Google cited in its transfer motion. Judge Albright rejected the patentee’s argument, noting that he “cannot and does not overrule the reasoning of the Federal Circuit in a patent case.” (Motion Offense slip op. at 7.)

He continued: “Although the Federal Circuit issues unpublished, nonprecedential transfer opinions, the Federal Circuit frequently cites these opinions as though they precedentially interpret Fifth Circuit law.” (Id. (emphasis mine).)

Given how important transfer disputes are to patent litigation—and how often they occur—it’s worth asking whether Judge Albright is correct about how the Federal Circuit treats its nonprecedential transfer decisions.

Since 2008, the Federal Circuit has issued well over 100 nonprecedential transfer decisions, most of them coming out of two district courts in the Fifth Circuit: the Eastern and Western Districts of Texas. Those nonprecedential Federal Circuit decisions technically aren’t binding in future cases. Indeed, under the Federal Circuit’s unusual choice-of-law regime, the venue analysis is ostensibly governed by Fifth Circuit precedent, so even Federal Circuit decisions designated as precedential are binding only to the extent they’re interpreting Fifth Circuit law.

Yet the Federal Circuit does, in fact, often cite its own nonprecedential transfer decisions as if they were binding interpretations of Fifth Circuit law.

*          *          *

Drawing on a dataset that Jason Rantanen, Jonas Anderson, and I developed for a soon-to-be published article on the Federal Circuit’s mandamus practice, I looked at every Federal Circuit ruling on a mandamus petition challenging a decision by Judge Albright to deny transfer under § 1404(a)—38 rulings in total, all issued since June 2020. I then examined the citations in those rulings to prior Federal Circuit and Fifth Circuit decisions.

The bottom line: nearly a quarter of the citations were to nonprecedential Federal Circuit opinions.

Figure 1: Citations to Federal Circuit and Fifth Circuit Opinions in Federal Circuit Mandamus Decisions Reviewing § 1404(a) Transfer Denials by Judge Albright

This result holds across both (1) the precedential status of the citing decision and (2) whether the citing decision granted or denied mandamus. The only possible exception is Federal Circuit decisions denying mandamus, which tend to be quite short and light on citations as whole, including citations to nonprecedential Federal Circuit decisions.

Table 1: Citations in Federal Circuit Mandamus Decisions That Are Designated as Precedential (n=4)

Table 2: Citations in Federal Circuit Mandamus Decisions That Are Designated as Nonprecedential (n=34)

Table 3: Citations in Federal Circuit Decisions That Grant Mandamus (n=20)

Table 4: Citations in Federal Circuit Decisions That Deny Mandamus (n=18)

*          *          *

It’s not just the numbers but also the substance of the rulings that reflect the Federal Circuit’s heavy reliance on prior nonprecedential decisions.

For instance, in granting a mandamus petition filed by Apple, the Federal Circuit chided Judge Albright for “erroneously discount[ing]” the location of third-party witnesses in the transfer analysis. The Federal Circuit quoted from its prior nonprecedential opinion in In re HP for the proposition that “there [is] ‘no basis to discount’ third-party entities . . . ‘just because individual employees [i.e., witnesses] were not identified’” in the transfer motion. (Apple slip op. at 6.) The Federal Circuit’s opinion in Apple also relied on and quoted from two prior, nonprecedential decisions involving Google to reject Judge Albright’s treatment of the location of party witnesses in the transfer analysis. (Id. at 7, 10.)

Indeed, one of those Google opinions itself relied on the Federal Circuit’s prior nonprecedential decision in In re TracFone in granting transfer, writing that “[t]his case fits squarely within that line of precedent”—the “line of precedent” consisting of two cases: the Federal Circuit’s precedential opinion in another dispute involving Apple, In re Apple Inc., 979 F.3d 1332 (Fed. Cir. 2020), and the nonprecedential decision in TracFone. (Google slip op. at 10.)

Similarly, in granting mandamus in In re Juniper Networks—a precedential decision—the Federal Circuit cited its prior nonprecedential opinion in In re Hulu five times, concluding that “this case is a very close cousin of our recent decisions in Samsung [precedential] and Hulu [nonprecedential], and the disposition of this case is largely dictated by the disposition of those cases.” (Juniper slip op. at 14 (emphasis mine).)

Perhaps the most stunning treatment of nonprecedential mandamus decisions by the Federal Circuit is In re Pandora Media, which actually contains more citations to nonprecedential Federal Circuit rulings than to precedential Federal Circuit rulings. The Federal Circuit’s determination that Judge Albright erred by disregarding the subpoena power of the proposed transferee court was based entirely on three nonprecedential opinions: a 2014 case involving Apple, the Hulu case mentioned above, and a 2018 case involving HP. (Pandora slip op. at 6.)

The Federal Circuit in Pandora also leaned on the nonprecedential opinions in TracFone and Google (both discussed above) in criticizing how Judge Albright analyzed considerations about convenience for potential witnesses, noting that “we held in TracFone and Google that the litigation should be conducted where more witnesses could testify without leaving their homes or their regular places of business.” (Pandora slip op. at 12 (emphasis mine).)

*          *          *

It’s tempting to brush off the Federal Circuit’s use of nonprecedential decisions to justify its venue mandamus rulings. Venue mandamus is a niche issue, brought to prominence by a semi-specialized appellate court that is fighting a problem of court competition somewhat unique to patent litigation. And sometimes the Federal Circuit discusses nonprecedential decisions because it was the parties who cited them in the first place, creating a bit of a chicken-or-egg dynamic.

Yet the court’s own rules are clear about how it’s supposed to treat nonprecedential decisions. Federal Circuit Rule 32.1(d) states, in relevant part:

The court may refer to a nonprecedential or unpublished disposition in an opinion or order and may look to a nonprecedential or unpublished disposition for guidance or persuasive reasoning but will not give one of its own nonprecedential dispositions the effect of binding precedent.

This rule makes plain that nonprecedential venue mandamus rulings are not binding law. But the Federal Circuit arguably treated them as such in cases like Google, Pandora, and many others.

Viewed in that light, Judge Albright’s frustration is understandable: how can he make transfer decisions that are consistent with Federal Circuit law when it’s impossible to tell precisely what that law is?

*          *          *

We live in a time of declining public trust in government institutions and skepticism of the rule of law. Though transfer disputes in patent litigation might not capture the public’s attention like Supreme Court cases about guns, abortion, or voting rights, the Federal Circuit’s unprincipled use of nonprecedential opinions is precisely the sort of everyday lawlessness that, over the long term, can strain trust in the courts.

*          *          *

A few methodological notes and caveats:

• In calculating the numbers reported above, I counted only citations within the analytical portion of the Federal Circuit’s ruling, and only in the portion of the court’s analysis addressing the § 1404(a) issue specifically.
• I ignored citations in “citing” or “quoting” parentheticals.
• I hand counted the citations, so it’s possible I missed or misclassified a small number of them. But the numbers are sufficiently large (545 relevant citations across 38 decisions) that a few errors, if they exist, wouldn’t affect the overall results much.
• David Hricik wrote for this blog about how, in an earlier version of the Motion Offense order, Judge Albright claimed he’d have denied transfer under Fifth Circuit venue law but was compelled to grant transfer under Federal Circuit law. That claim remains in the amended order mentioned above, though Judge Albright altered the text slightly, writing: “The Court’s decision turns on whether it should apply traditional Fifth Circuit transfer law or apply the Federal Circuit’s interpretations of Fifth Circuit transfer law. This Court cannot ignore or overrule cases from the Federal Circuit. Only because of those Federal Circuit cases, this Court GRANTS Defendant’s Motion to Transfer.” (Motion Offense slip op. at 1. (first emphasis mine))

By Jason Rantanen

There are lots of studies of Federal Circuit decisions, but very few involve the link between all cases filed at the district court cases and appeals. This prompted the question for me: who actually files appeals in patent infringement cases and how representative are they of the underlying civil actions filed in the courts? It turns out that the answer is “mostly patent asserters” and that they aren’t necessarily representative of case filings.

One of my research team’s ongoing projects is the Federal Circuit Dataset Project, which involves collecting all of the opinions & orders that the Federal Circuit makes available on its website, coding information about them, and then putting it all together into a publicly-accessible database that anyone can use to answer their own questions about the Federal Circuit.  There’s a user-friendly portal to the decisions dataset at empirical.law.uiowa.edu, and the full dataset is available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/CAFC_Dataset_Project.

This year, our major project involved linking up the CAFC dataset with datasets of patent infringement cases filed in the district courts. A draft of the first paper to spin out of this project is now up on SSRN at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4162979. (There is an option to download without logging in, but sometimes you have to hunt for it on the page.)  Thanks to the Houston Law Center’s Institute for Intellectual Property and Information Law for inviting me to present it at their national conference in June. Some takeaways:

• For patent infringement cases filed between 2011 and 2016, about 6% have at least one appeal, although this rate has been declining from 7.8% of cases filed in 2011 to 4.4% of cases filed in 2016.
• The average time from case filing to first appeal is 27 months, although there is substantial variation (SD of 18 months with rightward skew).
• Appeals are overwhelmingly filed by patent asserters: 82% of first appeals in the set were filed by patent asserters compared to 18% by accused infringers.

For this particular project, we linked the Federal Circuit dataset to the Stanford NPE Litigation Database, which contains coding on patent asserter types. (Details about the Stanford dataset are available in Miller et al., Who’s Suing Us? Decoding Patent Plaintiffs since 2000 with the Stanford NPE Litigation Dataset, 21 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. 235 (2018)). Using this data, we found some differences between the frequencies of case filings and appeals.  Figure 2 from the paper shows the most frequent cases by Stanford litigation dataset category. Category 1 are companies that acquired patents but do not themselves make any products or provide any services.

Figure 2 from Who Appeals Patent Cases

Figure 2 shows that while companies that acquired patents (Stanford litigation dataset category 1) filed 37% of patent infringement actions from 2011-2016, only 25% of appeals from cases filed between 2011 and 2016 arose from those cases. On the other hand, while product companies accounted for only slightly more patent infringement lawsuits (just over 40%), appeals in cases filed by product companies constituted 54% of all appeals filed. In other words, cases brought by product companies are appealed at a higher rater than cases brought by companies that acquired patents. This is consistent with prior findings that cases brought by PAEs settle at a higher rate than cases brought by product companies. Not only that, but we also found a difference in who is bringing the appeal in these cases: in cases brought by a PAE, the patent asserter was the primary appellant about 90% of the time, whereas in cases brought by product companies the patent asserter was the primary appellant only about 70% of the time.

What about who wins these cases?  That’s a bit more complex, and depends on how you define “win.” We define a “win” as obtaining an affirmance if a party is the appellee and an affirmance-in-part, reversal or vacate if a party is the appellant.  Using this definition, we found that overall, patent asserters usually lose on appeal, with product companies being much more successful than PAEs. However, this is heavily affected by the fact that both patent asserters generally and PAEs specifically are in the shoes of the appellant most of the time, and more often than not, the Federal Circuit affirms the district court.

The paper itself goes into more detail, including information about affirmance rates by appellant type, other categories, and the kinds of forms that these decisions take.  You can read it here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4162979.

Disclosure: I am receiving an honorarium from the University of Houston Law Center Institute for Intellectual Property & Information Law upon publication of this paper in the Houston Law Review.

By Paul R. Gugliuzza, Temple University Beasley School of Law; Jonas Anderson, American University Washington College of Law; and Jason Rantanen, University of Iowa College of Law

Recently, we wrote about the small number of mandamus decisions on transfer of venue that the Federal Circuit has designated as precedential and about how those precedential decisions are unrepresentative of overall outcomes. Specifically, the Federal Circuit has labeled only 15% of its venue mandamus orders as precedential. And, though the Federal Circuit grants venue mandamus less than a third of the time, the court has granted nearly 80% of the petitions it has decided in precedential orders.

As a comparison, we wanted to share some data on precedential opinion rates in regular Federal Circuit appeals (as opposed to mandamus petitions). Our data make two things clear.

• First, opinions in regular appeals are more than twice as likely to be precedential than orders on venue mandamus.
•  Second, the outcomes reported in those precedential opinions—like precedential mandamus orders—are skewed toward cases in which the Federal Circuit disagrees with the decision below.

On the first point, here’s the breakdown of precedential opinions, nonprecedential opinions, and Rule 36 affirmances for all Federal Circuit appeals from 2008 through 2021.

Table 1: Federal Circuit Panel Appeal Rulings, 2008 through 2021

Table 2 below breaks the data down by tribunal of origin.

Table 2: Federal Circuit Panel Appeal Rulings By Tribunal of Origin, 2008 through 2021

These two tables make clear that, overall, 30% of Federal Circuit appeals are decided in a precedential opinion. In district court cases—the most relevant comparator for venue mandamus petitions—the figure is 42%.

Either way, the proportion of appeals resolved in precedential opinions is substantially higher than for venue mandamus petitions. Moreover, the Federal Circuit decides more than a quarter of appeals in no-opinion affirmances—a mechanism the court does not employ for mandamus petitions. If we excluded Rule 36 affirmances from our calculations, the differences between appeals and mandamus orders would be even greater.

On the second point about skewed outcomes: Like with mandamus petitions, the results in precedential opinions disproportionately disagree with the lower court or agency. Table 3 below reports the outcomes and modes of disposition of all Federal Circuit appeals (excluding a few hundred appeals that were dismissed or that had an unusual outcome—namely, something other than affirmed, reversed, vacated, etc.) from 2008 through 2021.

Table 3: Federal Circuit Panel Appeal Rulings, Excluding Dismissals and Other Outcomes, 2008 through 2021

As the bottom row of the table makes clear, overall, the Federal Circuit fully affirms in 78% of appeals. Yet, as the first row of data indicates, only 53% of precedential Federal Circuit opinions affirm the lower tribunal; 47% vacate or reverse, at least in part. By contrast, nonprecedential opinions (the second row of data on the table) fully affirm 81% of the time. And, as indicated toward the bottom of the table, nearly 30% of Federal Circuit appeals are decided in no-opinion Rule 36 affirmances, which, by definition, also fully affirm across the board.

In short, looking only at precedential opinions, one might think that, in any given appeal, there’s about a 50-50 chance the Federal Circuit will at least partly disagree with the tribunal below. But, in reality, fewer than a quarter of the Federal Circuit’s decisions disagree with the tribunal below in any respect.

The disparity between the outcomes reported in precedential opinions versus overall results is equally stark when the data is limited to the primary sources of Federal Circuit patent cases—appeals from the district courts, the PTO, and the ITC. From those three tribunals, combined, only 48% of precedential opinions fully affirm. But the overall fully-affirmed rate in appeals from those tribunals is 73%. The figures below illustrate those vast disparities.

Figure 1: Federal Circuit Precedential Rulings in DCT, PTO, and ITC Appeals, 2008 through 2021

Figure 2: Federal Circuit Nonprecedential Rulings in DCT, PTO, and ITC Appeals, 2008 through 2021

The skew of precedential opinions toward decisions that disagree with the lower tribunal provide a misleading sense of what Federal Circuit’s rulings look like day in and day out, just like the Federal Circuit’s precedential venue mandamus orders provide an inflated sense of the likelihood of mandamus being granted. These findings also raise interesting questions about what happens to patent doctrine when it is developed in cases that are not representative of overall outcomes.

The data used in this post comes from the Federal Circuit Dataset Project, available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/UQ2SF7 or empirical.law.uiowa.edu.

By Paul R. Gugliuzza, Temple University Beasley School of Law; Jonas Anderson, American University Washington College of Law; and Jason Rantanen, University of Iowa College of Law. This is the second in a new series on venue transfer requests and mandamus at the Federal Circuit.

Litigants shouldn’t get to choose the judge who decides their case. To us, that seems like an uncontroversial proposition. The ability to “judge shop” is the primary reason patentees once flocked to the Marshall Division of the Eastern District of Texas to file their infringement suits and are now flocking to the Waco Division of the Western District of Texas, where they’re guaranteed to have their case assigned to Judge Alan Albright. Judge shopping, we’ve argued elsewhere, raises concerns about court bias and capture and can make litigation unnecessarily costly and inefficient.

Numerous scholars, members of Congress, and even the Chief Justice have raised concerns about judge shopping, with a particular eye toward patent cases. Likewise, the Federal Circuit has indicated skepticism about the rapid accumulation of patent suits in Waco. In the past two years, the court has used the extraordinary writ of mandamus to order over twenty patent cases filed in Waco to be transferred elsewhere under 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a), which permits transfer “[f]or the convenience of parties and witnesses, in the interest of justice.” (Over the same time period, the Federal Circuit granted only two § 1404(a) mandamus petitions arising from any other court, both from the Eastern District of Texas.)

Though we think the harms caused by a party being able to choose its own judge are clear and indisputable, there is a counternarrative. It goes something like this: the Federal Circuit is polluted with “anti-patent sentiment.” It is captured by the big tech companies that are the most frequent targets of infringement suits—Apple, Google, and the like. And the Federal Circuit is thwarting patentees (and innovation) by sending infringement cases away from patentees’ chosen courts in Texas to places that are friendlier to defendants, such as the Northern District of California.

Fortunately, data we have collected as part of our comprehensive empirical study of mandamus practice at the Federal Circuit can help us assess whether, when it comes to questions about patent venue, the Federal Circuit is really in the pocket of big tech.

First off, it is true that mandamus petitions seeking transfer from Texas to the Northern District of California are more likely to be granted than petitions seeking transfer to other districts. As the table below shows, from 2008 through 2021, the Federal Circuit granted 32.0% of mandamus petitions seeking to overturn a district court decision denying transfer from the Eastern District of Texas to the Northern District of California as compared to 25.6% of petitions seeking transfer from the Eastern District of Texas to any district besides the Northern District of California. Likewise, the Federal Circuit granted 63.2% of mandamus petitions seeking to overturn a district court decision denying transfer from the Western District of Texas to the Northern District of California as compared to 46.2% of petitions seeking transfer from the Western District of Texas to any district besides the Northern District of California.Overall, mandamus petitions seeking to overturn a district court decision denying transfer from either Texas district to the Northern District of California were granted 45.5% of the time, while petitions seeking transfer from either Texas district to any district besides the Northern District of California were granted only 30.8% of the time.

To be clear, this disparity in grant rates among transferee courts doesn’t establish that the Federal Circuit unduly favors Silicon Valley-based tech companies. Rather, it may be that cases filed against those companies in Texas present particularly strong cases for transfer given that the defendants’ offices, employees, documents, and R&D facilities tend to be located in California. Regardless, the data does make clear that a mandamus petition seeking transfer from Texas to the Northern District of California is nearly 40% more likely to be granted than a petition seeking transfer from Texas to any other district.

To better gauge big tech’s success at the Federal Circuit, we can also look at the grant rates for individual mandamus petitioners. We found these results, frankly, a little surprising. First of all, there are not as many repeat petitioners as one might think. In total, from 2008 through 2021, roughly 185 individual parties joined one or more petitions for a writ of mandamus seeking to overturn a decision by the Eastern or Western District of Texas denying transfer under § 1404(a). (For the purpose of this analysis, we combined obviously related corporate entities, such as Samsung Electronics and Samsung Electronics America. Also, because many petitions are joined by multiple parties, the total number of petitioners is much larger than the number of Federal Circuit decisions.)

The most frequent petitioner in our dataset is Apple, which filed 16 petitions over the 14 years covered by our study. The Federal Circuit granted 4 of those petitions. The most successful petitioner of note is Google, which prevailed on 4 of its 6 petitions. But those numbers are small, making it hard to draw definitive conclusions.

The table below shows the results of Federal Circuit mandamus decisions in which the Eastern or Western District of Texas denied transfer under § 1404(a), limited to petitioners who appeared in three or more decisions from 2008 through 2021.As indicated on the first table above, the overall grant rate for Federal Circuit mandamus petitions challenging denials of § 1404(a) transfer motions by the Eastern or Western District of Texas is 37.5%, so these frequent petitioners do about average. (Though of course the mandamus grant rates in cases out of the Eastern and Western Districts of Texas are much higher than in cases filed elsewhere.)

If we added the Federal Circuit’s mandamus decisions from 2022 (after we closed the dataset for our study at the end of 2021), the numbers would change somewhat. Apple is 2-0 this year, which ups its grant rate to 33.3%. Google also won its only petition in 2022, bumping its grant rate up even higher, to 71.4%. Samsung likewise is 1-0 this year, so its rate is now 50%. Still, we would hesitate to say that any of this establishes that the Federal Circuit is biased against patentees and in thrall to big tech.

To be sure, the world’s richest corporations, like Apple and Google, enjoy massive advantages any time they litigate; the notion that we have an impartial court system indifferent to litigants’ economic power is fanciful. But it’s also specious to claim that the Federal Circuit’s mandamus practice indicates court capture by big tech. More likely, the Federal Circuit is using the imperfect tools at its disposal to fix a real problem: the questionable incentives for both judges and litigants in a system where the party filing a case gets to choose its judge.

By Jason Rantanen

University of Massachusetts, Carmel Laboratories, LLC v. L’Oréal, S.A., L’Oréal USA, Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2022) – opinion

Panel: Prost, Mayer, Taranto (author)

This opinion nominally addressing indefiniteness illustrates the power of de novo claim construction review at the Federal Circuit. UMass’s claimed invention is a topical skin care product containing adenosine that is applied to the skin. The district court concluded that the claim was indefinite, but on appeal the Federal Circuit negated the indefiniteness determination by adopting the claim construction proposed by L’Oréal – a victory for sorts of UMass but, based on the briefs, not the outcome it was looking for.

The difficulty in this case arose from the combination of the structure of the skin and the wording that UMass used to claim the invention. Starting with the skin structure, the relevant parts basically look like this:

Figure 1: “Artist”‘s representation of skin layers

Representative claim 1 of patent number 6,645,513 reads:

A method for enhancing the condition of unbroken skin of a mammal by reducing one or more of wrinkling, roughness, dryness, or laxity of the skin, without increasing dermal cell proliferation, the method comprising [1] topically applying to the skin a composition comprising a concentration of adenosine in [2] an amount effective to enhance the condition of the skin without increasing dermal cell proliferation, [3] wherein the adenosine concentration applied to the dermal cells is 10-3 M to 10-7 M.

(bracketed numbers and emphasis added).

Apparently seeking to avoid a noninfringement outcome, UMass argued that the “wherein” clause [3] referred to the concentration of adenosine that seeped into the dermis rather than the concentration of the product applied to the skin. But since  clause [1] and [3] thus referred to different concentrations, the result was an ambiguity in the meaning of composition clause [1] and “effective” clause [2]: what is a “concentration of adenosine in an amount effective to enhance the condition of the skin”?  Relying on the subjective determination precedent, the district court concluded that this phrase was indefinite: “Indeed, the determination of whether a person’s skin is enhanced provides a paradigmatic example of indefiniteness. Beauty, after all, is “in the eyes of the beholder.”” University of Massachusetts v. L’Oréal USA, Inc., 534 F. Supp. 3d 349 (D. Del. 2021). UMass appealed the indefiniteness determination, trying to thread the needle between a limiting claim construction and an indefiniteness outcome. L’Oréal both responded on the indefiniteness point and advanced its own claim construction argument.

The Federal Circuit could plausibly have affirmed on indefiniteness in my non-judicial opinion. However, instead the Federal Circuit focused on claim construction, walking through its standard claim construction analysis and concluding that clause [3] actually referred to the concentration of adenosine in the product applied to the skin, not the resultant concentration in the dermis. Because this removed a necessary predicate of the district court’s indefiniteness determination, the consequence was a remand to the district court for further proceedings.

The Federal Circuit first concluded that the claim itself was ambiguous about what clause [3] referred to: “We first conclude that the relevant claim language, es-pecially when viewed in the context of the whole claim, is not plain on its face, much less plain in supporting UMass’s interpretation of it.” Slip Op. at 8. The opinion spends several pages discussing this; worthwhile reading if you are making a text-based argument, but too much depth to go into in a blog post.

The next step in claim construction is to look at the specification. This didn’t provide much support for UMass’s claim construction position, however: “UMass has not shown that, even in this context, the specification makes clear that the inventors contemplated measuring the adenosine concentration after exposure to the cells, rather than in a solution before application to the cells.” Id. at 12.

The last step of the intrinsic evidence analysis, however, did produce a clear outcome to the court.  “Even more strongly than the specification, the prosecution histories of the patents in question resolve the ambiguity surrounding the meaning of “the adenosine concentration applied to the dermal cells” in the wherein clause.” Id.  The Federal Circuit concluded:

The amendments and comments clearly convey that UMass was continuing the pre-amendment reliance on the concentration in the composition before application to the skin, rather than introducing a materially different, unexplained notion of concentration, no longer assessed before contact with the object of application. UMass’s proposed construction now cannot fairly be squared with the understanding that both it and the examiner expressed during prosecution, and on which skilled artisans are entitled to rely.

Id. at 14. Because the use of the prosecution history was to resolve a lingering ambiguity in the claim language, this was not a case where the “clear and unmistakable disclaimer” standard applied for overcoming an otherwise plain meaning of the claim.

Guest post by Paul R. Gugliuzza, Temple University Beasley School of Law; Jonas Anderson, American University Washington College of Law; and Jason Rantanen, University of Iowa College of Law.

We’ve written here a few times about how the parties seeking Federal Circuit review use the writ of mandamus to get around the usual rule that only final, case-ending judgments can be appealed. The primary conclusion of our research (which will appear in the Washington University Law Review later this year) is that, though the Federal Circuit grants mandamus far more frequently than any other federal court of appeals, the Federal Circuit’s high grant rate is driven almost entirely by mandamus petitions in patent infringement cases out of the Eastern and Western Districts of Texas that raise questions about transfer of venue for convenience reasons under 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a).

For example, from late 2020 through the end of 2021, the Federal Circuit decided 34 mandamus petitions challenging § 1404(a) transfer decisions by Judge Alan Albright of the Western District of Texas, who now hears more patent cases than any other judge in the country. The Federal Circuit granted twenty of those petitions, or 58.9%. Overall, from 2008 through 2021, the Federal Circuit granted 37.3% of mandamus petitions out of the Eastern and Western Districts of Texas on § 1404(a) issues (38 of 102). Outside of § 1404(a) petitions from those two district courts, however, the Federal Circuit’s mandamus grant rate (on all issues, from all lower tribunals) was only 9.9% (30 of 304).

With the Federal Circuit issuing so many mandamus decisions on transfer of venue, one might presume that the law governing the standard for obtaining mandamus relief, as well as for evaluating transfer motions under § 1404(a), is robust and well-developed.

But that is far from true.

As an empirical matter, the Federal Circuit designated only 4 of the 34 recent mandamus decisions reviewing Judge Albright as precedential. And all 4 were grants. So not only is the quantity of precedential case law small, it’s not representative of overall results.

In fact, from 2008 through 2021, the Federal Circuit issued only 19 precedential decisions on § 1404(a) transfer out of 128 total decisions. And the precedential decisions disproportionately granted mandamus: 15 grants, only 4 denials. By comparison, in nonprecedential mandamus decisions, the grant rate was substantially lower: 26 grants, 83 denials. The figure below puts the unrepresentative nature of the Federal Circuit’s precedential § 1404(a) mandamus orders in stark relief.

Figure 1: Decision form for petitions for writs of mandamus at the Federal Circuit, 2008-2021This data raises the question: Does the lack of precedent and the skewed nature of the outcomes in it matter? Even if every Federal Circuit § 1404(a) mandamus decision were treated as binding precedent, the fact-intensive and case-specific nature of the § 1404(a) inquiry arguably permits a judge (whether a district judge or a Federal Circuit judge deciding a mandamus petition) to justify almost any outcome in a given case. Moreover, as a matter of Federal Circuit choice-of-law doctrine, transfer of venue issues that arise in patent cases, as well as the standard for obtaining the extraordinary writ of mandamus, aren’t even governed by Federal Circuit precedent—they’re governed by the precedent of the regional circuit from which the case arises.

Nevertheless, we think there are at least three reasons to be concerned about the current state of appellate precedent on mandamus and convenience transfer in patent cases.

First, it is strange that there is so little binding law on such important issues. In the regional circuits, mandamus decisions on transfer of venue are almost nonexistent. (From 2019 through 2021, there was only one, total.) And the same goes for mandamus more generally: as we report in more detail in our article, over the past three years, the Federal Circuit has granted roughly the same number of mandamus petitions (24) as every other federal court of appeals combined. Yet none of this Federal Circuit case law is “law” in the way lawyers usually think about appellate decisions that are labeled as “precedential.”

Second, the lack of binding precedent on venue-related mandamus illustrates the problematic nature of the Federal Circuit’s choice-of-law rules more generally, under which some legal issues that frequently arise in patent cases are not governed by the (often ample) Federal Circuit precedent on the issue. Other notable issues, in addition to venue and mandamus, that are not actually governed by Federal Circuit decisional law include: the standard for pleading a claim of patent infringement, the criteria for granting injunctive relief for patent infringement, and the substantive standards governing claims in other areas of federal IP law, such as copyright and trade secrets. (For a thoughtful critique of the entire concept of “circuit law,” see Tommy Bennett’s forthcoming article, There Is No Such Thing As Circuit Law.)

Finally, the Federal Circuit’s venue-related mandamus precedent (or, the lack thereof) provides another example of how the Federal Circuit’s decisions about whether to designate a ruling as precedential or nonprecedential can distort perceptions about what the court is really doing. For instance, as one of us showed in a prior study with Mark Lemley, the Federal Circuit upholds the validity of a patent over a challenge on patentable subject matter grounds about 20% of the time when it decides the case in a precedential opinion. In nonprecedential opinions and summary affirmances under Federal Circuit Rule 36, however, the court upholds the validity of a patent challenged as lacking patentable subject matter less than 2% of the time. Similarly, on § 1404(a) mandamus petitions, a review of precedential decisions makes it look like over three-quarters of them are granted. But, in reality, the grant rate is less than one-third.

What should be done to alleviate these concerns? For starters, the Federal Circuit should reconsider its needlessly complex, unpredictable—and arguably meaningless—choice of law regime. (We tend to think that most lawyers and judges treat the Federal Circuit’s § 1404(a) mandamus decisions as binding, even if they are not as a matter of formal doctrine.) Instead, the Federal Circuit should simply apply its own precedent to all federal issues that arise in patent cases. In addition, the Federal Circuit could be more conscientious when deciding whether to designate mandamus decisions as precedential, making sure that its precedential rulings are more representative of the population of mandamus decisions as a whole. More fundamentally, we might question whether the precedential/nonprecedential distinction continues to make sense in an age where the internet makes it easy to access the vast majority of federal appellate decisions (though certainly not all of them).