From Stewart to Squires: The PTAB’s First-Year Reset in IPRs and PGRs

Adversarial proceedings at the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) have undergone significant changes in just one year. The biggest change is not a single doctrinal development but a redefinition of institution itself. Institution decisions are no longer handled by panels of administrative patent judges. Instead, the Director individually leads a screening of petitions focused on who is filing, whether positions are being advanced consistently across forums, and whether the Office views the petition as an appropriate use of limited agency resources. For companies and PTAB practitioners, that shift changes the strategy before filing, during institution, and, in some cases, even after institution.

INSTITUTION RESET

During the first year of the new administration, the most important PTAB development has been a change in how institution functions in practice. Discretionary considerations were not new; Fintiv and the Vidal-era guidance had already made institution policy a central feature of PTAB practice. What changed over the last year is the degree of centralization and the breadth of the policy screen now being applied at institution. That reset began under former Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart in March 2025 and became more centralized and more explicit under Director John A. Squires after he took office in September 2025. [1]

The first step was procedural. On February 28, 2025, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) rescinded the 2022 interim discretionary denial memorandum. [2] On March 24, 2025, the Office issued guidance confirming that the rescission restored pre-2022 practice under Fintiv and Sotera.[3] Two days later, Stewart’s March 26 memorandum formalized a separate discretionary-briefing track, bifurcated institution between discretionary issues handled by the Director and merits issues handled later, and tied the change to PTAB workload and the need to preserve capacity for ex parte appeals. [4]

That framework also opened the door to briefing on issues such as settled expectations and compelling economic, public health, and national security interests. [5] Then, in October 2025, Squires went further, centralizing institution determinations in the Director and announcing that routine cases would be resolved through summary notices, with fuller written decisions reserved for novel, important, or especially complex issues. [6] The same month, the Office also withdrew the pending 2024 discretionary denial rulemaking and proposed new IPR institution rules aimed at concentrating IPRs on claims not previously challenged in litigation and at limiting serial or parallel challenges—another sign of the Office’s move toward a more restrictive, one-challenge institution model. [7]

IDENTITY MATTERS

If one doctrine best captures the practical shift, it is real party in interest (RPI). In September 2025, Squires de-designated SharkNinja. [8] In October 2025, he designated Corning Optical Communications RF, LLC v. PPC Broadband Inc., IPR2014-00440, Paper 68, as precedential, restoring the Office’s pre-SharkNinja view that Section 312(a)(2) must be satisfied before institution. [9] That move did more than revive an older procedural rule. The designation memorandum expressly framed accurate RPI identification as serving interests beyond time bar and estoppel, including public interest and national security concerns associated with opaque investment structures and state-linked actors. [10] Parent entities, indemnitors, funding relationships, control rights, and coordinated defense arrangements now deserve additional front-end scrutiny before a petition is filed.

The decisions that followed Corning show how much turns on that shift. In Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. v. Micron Technology, Inc., the Director vacated prior institution decisions and denied review because the petitioner failed to satisfy Section 312(a)(2) by adequately identifying all RPIs. [11]

In Curium US LLC v. Universität Heidelberg, the Office held that once additional RPIs are identified, the petition receives a new filing date; because there was no Section 315(b) problem there, the case continued, but the earlier discretionary denial papers and preliminary response were expunged and the schedule was reset. [12]

And in Aylo Freesites Ltd. v. Dish Technologies LLC, corrected RPI disclosures triggered a new filing date, the petition became time barred, the final written decision was vacated, and the petition was dismissed. [13] That is the clearest sign that RPI is no longer merely a curable notice defect. It can impact institution, filing date, time bar, and even post-institution finality. For in-house counsel managing multi-entity corporate structures or supplier-customer disputes, the lesson is straightforward: map potential RPIs and privies early, and refresh that analysis before filing if the case posture changes.

SOVEREIGNTY AND US INTERESTS

Tianma Microelectronics Co., Ltd. v. LG Display Co., Ltd., designated precedential in March 2026, pushes the same theme into sovereignty and domestic policy territory. Tianma holds that, under Return Mail and the Director’s broad institution discretion, a foreign government is not a "person" permitted to seek AIA review and that the same logic bars institution when a foreign government is an RPI.[14] Read alongside Corning, Tianma shows that the Office is treating petitioner identity as a substantive institution issue, not merely a formal disclosure question.

That same understanding appears in Squires’ March 11, 2026 memorandum directing parties to address US manufacturing and small business considerations in discretionary briefing. The memo states that the Director will consider, among other things, the extent to which accused products are manufactured in the United States or are tied to American manufacturing investment, whether competing patent owner products are manufactured in the United States, and whether the petitioner is a small business sued for infringement. [15]

These factors reinforce the same larger point: institution is being used to weigh not only merits and litigation efficiency, but also identity, alignment, and perceived system interests. In-house teams should account for those facts when developing both offensive and defensive PTAB strategy, especially where supply chain, domestic manufacturing, or small-business narratives are compelling.

CONSISTENCY AND COMPLETENESS

Claim construction is another major throughline. The PTAB has long said that it applies the same basic claim-construction standard used in district court, but the recent cases place renewed focus on cross-forum consistency as an institution issue in its own right. In Cambridge Mobile Telematics v. Sfara, designated informative in March 2025, the PTAB denied institution and, in doing so, underscored the importance of explaining why different claim-construction positions—there, means-plus-function in district court and plain meaning at the PTAB—are warranted across forums. [16]

That principle hardened in late 2025. In Revvo Technologies v. Cerebrum Sensor Technologies, designated precedential, the Director made clear that a petitioner must explain why different claim construction positions are warranted and that merely adopting the patent owner’s district-court construction is not enough. [17]

Two days later, Tesla v. Intellectual Ventures II was designated informative, with the PTAB clarifying that the unavailability of indefiniteness arguments in IPRs does not, by itself, explain differing positions across forums. [18] Stewart’s September 16, 2025 memorandum on prior findings of fact and conclusions of law reinforces the same understanding by requiring the PTAB to explain departures from earlier Office, district court, or US International Trade Commission (ITC) determinations on substantially similar claims. [19]

The practical consequence is that petitioners should now treat district court, ITC, and PTAB positions as part of a single advocacy record. Stewart’s July 31, 2025 memorandum enforcing Rule 42.104(b)(4) pushes in the same direction on petition drafting. Under that memorandum, applicant-admitted prior art, expert testimony, common sense, and other forms of "general knowledge" may support a motivation to combine or explain the knowledge of a skilled artisan, but they may not supply a missing claim limitation. [20]

Taken together, the claim construction decisions and the Rule 42.104(b)(4) memorandum make the front end of an IPR or PGR less forgiving both as to consistency and as to completeness. For in-house counsel, this serves as a reminder to demand tight coordination from outside-counsel teams across parallel matters, including claim construction theories, expert positions, and invalidity themes, all vetted across forums before they harden into inconsistent records.

DISCRETION CAN CUT BOTH WAYS

At the same time, the current regime is not best described as simply anti-petitioner or anti-IPR. The Office has also identified affirmative reasons not to discretionarily deny review where a petition appears useful to the agency itself. In Padagis US LLC v. Neurelis Inc., later designated informative, discretionary denial was rejected in part because the petition appeared to expose a material Office error during examination concerning priority. [21]

Likewise, Squires’ November 17, 2025 memorandum explains that a voluntary disclosure of how prior art was found may weigh in favor of institution because that information may improve Office search practices and examination quality. [22]

The broader conclusion is that discretion is now being used in two directions. It is being used to screen out petitions the Office regards as defective, misaligned, or inefficient. But it is also being used to prefer petitions the Office views as helping patent system administration, whether by surfacing examination error or by supplying information the agency can reuse. For in-house counsel, that cuts in favor of framing petitions not only as persuasive merits presentations, but also as credible, administrable proceedings that help the Office do its job.

COST OF CENTRALIZATION

The principal cost of the new framework may be greater uncertainty and less transparency. The Director Review docket reflects repeated intervention in institution decisions, particularly in RPI and claim-construction disputes. [23] At the same time, Squires’ October 17, 2025 memorandum moved routine institution outcomes to summary notices, meaning fewer fully reasoned institution decisions in ordinary cases even as selected opinions continue to announce major policy shifts. [24] The result is stronger policy direction from the top, but less day-to-day explanation in the average institution outcome.

For petitioners and patent owners alike, that creates a new planning problem. The most consequential issues may now be the ones that are easiest to underweight at filing, including who must be disclosed, whether positions taken elsewhere can be defended before the PTAB, what discretionary facts should be developed up front, and whether the case can be framed as an appropriate use of Office resources. In-house counsel should therefore treat institution planning as a cross-functional exercise involving litigation, prosecution, business stakeholders, and any entities whose relationships could bear on RPI, privity, manufacturing, or equitable narrative.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The Stewart-to-Squires period is best understood not as a loose collection of memos and edge-case rulings. It is a reset in what institution is for. Institution now asks three questions more aggressively than before: (1) Is this petitioner properly before the Office? (2) Is the petitioner litigating consistently across forums? and (3) Is this the sort of challenge the Office believes serves patent system administration and broader US innovation interests?

Unless the Federal Circuit or future rulemaking imposes sharper boundaries, companies and practitioners should expect those questions to continue shaping IPR and PGR practice in the near term. [25] For in-house IP counsel, the near-term response is practical rather than theoretical: tighten RPI diligence, align positions across forums, develop discretionary facts early, and make filing decisions with a clearer view of how the petition will be perceived as an institutional ask, not just a merits submission. The same shift also makes alternative validity tools worth evaluating—including ex parte reexamination in the right case—and may require budgeting for the possibility that more disputes will be litigated or settled without a reliable PTAB off ramp.