SOUTHFIELD, Mich. – Brooks Kushman Shareholder Linda Mettes was quoted in a Law360 January 16, 2019 article, “High Court Urged To Keep Standing Limits On PTAB Appeals.”
Client GKN is the owner of U.S. Patent No. 8,215,440 B2 – which has now been twice reviewed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office including the inter partes review (“IPR”) initiated by JTEKT Corp. On January 23, 2017, the Board issued a final written decision in GKN’s favor, confirming the patentability of the claims at issue in the ’440 Patent.
The article discusses the Federal Circuit’s decision to rule that JTEKT failed to meet its burden to establish the injury-in-fact prong of Article III standing. In the article, Mettes is quoted saying that JTEKT is not “a great vehicle” for a Supreme Court review of standing, noting that JTEKT had only raised an argument about a purported potential infringement before the Federal Circuit and then failed to prove that basis for standing. The Federal Circuit analyzed JTEKT’s own declarations and found that, “JTEKT expressly conceded that ‘no product is yet finalized,’” and that “JTEKT repeatedly stressed that ‘[b]ecause JTEKT has not yet developed a final product, there is nothing that can be analyzed for infringement.’” JTEKT’s failure of proof on standing is an atypical situation and not an issue that merits Supreme Court review.
Mettes also said that JTEKT had gotten “their fair challenge” at the USPTO, where Article III standing is not required. The IPR provision of the AIA has achieved remarkable success in generating robust participation based on recent USPTO statistics that show that 8,803 IPR petitions have been received over the six-year period since it went into effect. GKN’s patent weathered a full and fair challenge in the USPTO, and the Board issued its final written decision that confirmed the patentability of the patent claims at issue.
Mettes is a registered patent attorney that focuses on intellectual property litigation. She has handled patent, trademark, copyright and trade secret cases in Federal courts across the country in a wide array of technologies, including mechanical, electrical, chemical and pharmaceutical.
The Brooks Kushman team representing GKN includes Mettes, Kristin L. Murphy, Sangeeta Shah, and Anita Marinelli.
The full article can be found on the Law360 website here.
