PTAB Open Analytics

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) is an administrative court inside the USPTO. It was created by the America Invents Act (AIA) in 2012 specifically to give companies a faster, cheaper way to challenge patent validity than federal court litigation.

The primary mechanism is called Inter Partes Review (IPR). Any person or company can file a petition asking PTAB to review whether an issued patent's claims are valid based on prior art. If PTAB agrees to hear the case (an "institution" decision), the patent owner must defend their claims before a panel of three Administrative Patent Judges (APJs). If the petitioner prevails, the claims are cancelled and the patent can no longer be enforced.

IPRs are heavily used by large technology companies to defend themselves against patent enforcement. They're also used strategically before or during litigation to weaken a patent while a parallel case proceeds in federal court.

PTAB institution rates and procedures have been in flux. The Fintiv doctrine (a 2020 PTAB precedent that allowed denial of IPR petitions if parallel district court litigation was advanced) was scaled back by the Biden administration, leading to higher institution rates. Under the current administration, additional changes to PTAB discretion, eligibility standards, and director review powers are being actively discussed and litigated.

This matters because the same patent can be worth very different amounts depending on the current institution rate environment. A 2019 patent facing IPR in a 62% institution-rate year has a different risk profile than the same patent challenged in a 73% institution-rate year. Tracking these trends is part of managing IP risk.

The data below covers 19,140 PTAB proceedings since 2012, pulled from the USPTO's public API. No paywall. No vendor spin.

The overall institution rate across all IPR proceedings since 2012 is 60%. The reliable window for analysis is 2021–2024 — large sample sizes and complete decision records. Pre-2018 data has coverage gaps in the decisions API.

Mechanical and Medical Devices leads at 66.1%. Chemical and Materials is the hardest field to institute at 50.5% — a 15-point spread that matters when evaluating petition viability across different portfolios.

Apple leads all petitioners with 1,112 filings since 2012. Meta Platforms has the highest win rate among high-volume filers at 87.3%. Netflix leads all filers with a 92% institution rate across 92 petitions.

The most-challenged entities are overwhelmingly NPEs and patent assertion entities. Intellectual Ventures leads with 112 proceedings. Finjan is a standout: 23-of-23 decided challenges survived — the highest survival rate among high-volume respondents.

The most-filed adversarial pairs in PTAB history. Apple vs. Masimo (70 filings) is the Apple Watch health sensor dispute. Comcast vs. Rovi (63 filings, 2 institutions) shows that filing volume does not equal success.

The PTAB issues institution decisions in a remarkably tight window. The 35-day spread between the 25th and 75th percentile shows the board runs on a strict internal clock — driven by the statutory 3-month deadline from the patent owner's preliminary response.

The statutory path: petitioner files → patent owner files preliminary response (3 months) → PTAB issues decision (3 months from POPR). Total: ~6 months from petition filing to institution decision.

If instituted, final written decisions typically follow 12 months after institution — meaning total trial time is approximately 18 months from petition filing to FWD.

Administrative Patent Judges are not interchangeable. Institution rates range from 52% to 77% across high-volume judges. Use this data for context — not prediction. APJ assignment is not fully public or predictable, and rates reflect all case types across all technology areas.

Data source: All data pulled from the USPTO PTAB API v3 at api.uspto.gov/api/v1/patent/trials/. Two endpoints: proceedings search (19,140 records) and decisions search (20,350 records). Collected April 13, 2026.

Institution rate definition: Institution rate = decisions with outcome “instituted” / (instituted + denied). Pending, settled, and dismissed cases are excluded from the denominator.

Included in “Instituted”: Institution Granted, Final Written Decision, Affirmed, Settled After Institution, Request for Adverse Judgment.

Included in “Denied”: Institution Denied, Settled Before Institution, Dismissed Before Institution.

Pre-SAS Institute note: Before the Supreme Court’s 2018 SAS Institute v. Iancu decision, the PTAB could institute on some grounds and deny others. This analysis currently treats all pre-2018 institution decisions as binary — a known simplification.

Early year data quality: Institution rates for 2012–2017 are anomalously low in this dataset (1–10%) compared to published studies showing 60–80% rates in that era. The decisions API endpoint has incomplete coverage for older decisions. Treat pre-2018 rates as unreliable.

Entity resolution: Petitioner and respondent names are normalized using a canonical names file. “Google Inc.” and “Google LLC” may appear as separate entities — a known gap.

Reproducibility: All scripts are in the GitHub repo. Run python3 collect.py then python3 analyze.py to reproduce this dataset from scratch. Data refreshes quarterly.