Patents for financial technologies are in the crosshairs. They were targeted in Bilski and have been besieged since Alice. Although FinTech patents have been grabbing many recent headlines, reliable data addressing exactly how these patents have fared in Patent Trial and Appeal Board validity challenges remains sparse. For example, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office publishes statistics about petition filings by technology classification, but does not publish statistics about win rates by classification. Further, the USPTO's published data combines the categories of "mechanical" and "business method," which makes it difficult to isolate trends affecting FinTech patents alone. In this article, Finnegan attorneys Jeffrey A. Berkowitz and Elliot C. Cook examine claim survival rates in PTAB proceedings—separately for covered business method review and inter partes review—on a technology-by-technology basis.

Originally published by Law360

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