Patent Dispute Report: 2025 Mid-Year Report

In the first six months of 2025 – as Unified had flagged last quarter – discretionary denials increased sharply at the PTAB, the result of changes by USPTO Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart to the PTAB’s rules and procedures for evaluating inter partes review (IPR) and post-grant review (PGR) petitions. These changes include a bifurcated process for deciding whether to institute an IPR or PGR, emphasizing director discretion, and the expansion of the considerations for discretionary denial, including the reinstatement of the Fintiv factors and several new factors, including “settled expectations,” compelling public interests, and the extent to which the petition relies upon expert testimony.

In the federal district courts, the Eastern District of Texas remains the predominant venue for patent case filings, followed by the Western District of Texas and the District of Delaware. The E.D.Tex. continues to be the most popular venue for NPEs.

Additionally, requests for ex parte reexamination are currently on pace to match 2024’s level.

Key takeaways:  

• Based on the first six months of 2025, PTAB, ex parte reexamination, and district court filings are currently on pace to slightly exceed 2024’s numbers. 

• The W.D.Tex is increasing in popularity. Last year, it was the fourth most popular venue for patent filings and the second most popular for NPE filings; it is currently the second most popular venue for patent filings and NPE patent filings.

• Combined, the Eastern and Western Districts of Texas accounted for 40% of all patent cases filed in the first six months of 2025 and 63.7% of all NPE cases filed during the same time period.

• It remains to be seen how the increase in discretionary denials at the PTAB and the new bifurcated process emphasizing director discretion for determining institution on the merits will affect the number of IPR and PGR petitions filed in the rest of 2025. 

• In the Unified Patent Court, the number of infringement actions filed in the first six months of 2025 are projected to match 2024’s total.

Procedural Denials in PTAB Increase: The PTAB has issued 45% more procedural denials in the first six months of 2025 than it did in the entire year of 2024, and is well on pace to be one of the highest years on record. In June 2025 alone, the PTAB issued 75 procedural denials, an all-time high.

PTAB, Ex Parte and District Court Filings Increase: PTAB filings for the first six months of 2025 are at 53.9% of 2024’s total, while ex parte examination filings are at 52.4% of 2024’s total. District court filings are at 57.1% of 2024’s total. As of yet, we see more district court litigation, with roughly the same number of patent challenges.

Eastern District of Texas Remains No. 1: The E.D.Tex. continues to be the most popular venue for patent filings, with 28.2% of cases filed in the first six months of 2025, followed by the W.D.Tex. at 11.8%, the D.Del. at 11.2%, the N.D.Ill. at 8%, and the D.N.J. at 5.5%. It remains to be seen whether Judge Albright’s recent move to Austin will lead to more filings there.

The W.D.Tex. overall has increased in popularity in 2025. Last year, the five most popular venues were: the E.D.Tex. (28.5%), the N.D.Ill. (10.6%), the D.Del. (10.2%), the W.D.Tex. (9.6%), and the D.N.J. (6.7%).

NPEs Still Prefer the Eastern District of Texas: Almost 45% of all NPE cases filed in the first six months of 2025 were in the E.D.Tex., followed by 18.8% filed in the W.D.Tex. This is consistent with 2024, when 48.6% of all NPE cases were filed in the E.D.Tex., followed by the W.D.Tex. at 15%. 

In the first six months of 2025, NPEs filed 89.5% of the patent cases filed in the E.D.Tex. and 89.7% of the patent cases filed in the W.D.Tex. More than 63% of NPE cases were filed in either the Eastern or Western District of Texas.

NPEs Dominate the Top 10 Plaintiffs: In the first six months of 2025, nine of the top 10 plaintiffs in district court were NPEs. Four of the top 10 plaintiffs (Torus Ventures, HyperQuery, SecureMatrix, and Authentixx) were Jeffrey M. Gross entities, with Torus Ventures the top plaintiff, filing 74 cases.

Post-Grant Proceedings: Petitions for inter partes review accounted for 73.7% of requests for post-grant proceedings in the first six months of 2025, while petitions for post-grant review made up 3.6% of all proceedings, and requests for ex parte reexaminations accounted for 22.8%. These current numbers are so far consistent with last year’s totals.

Top 10 Patent Owners in PTAB: In the first six months of 2025, more than half of the top 10 patent owners defending against a petition filed in the PTAB were NPEs.

Top 10 Defendants in District Court and Top 10 PTAB Defendants: There remains an overlap between the most active defendants in district court and the most active petitioners in the PTAB in the first six months of 2025, with Samsung, Amazon, and Apple in the top three spots for both.

Requests for Ex Parte Reexaminations: The number of requests for ex parte reexaminations in the first six months of 2025 is slightly more than half of the 2024 total.

The top requester of ex parte reexaminations in the first six months of 2025 was Unified Patents, accounting for more than 16% of all filings. 

Filing Trends in District Court by Entity:  NPEs filed 56.1% of the patent cases in district court in the first six months of 2025, while operating companies filed 40.3%.

Filing Trends in High Tech by Entity Type: In the first six months of 2025, NPEs filed 91% of the district court patent cases in the high tech space.

Filing Trends in PTAB by Entity Type over Time: NPEs were patent owners on 50.5% of the PTAB petitions in the first six months of 2025, while operating companies were patent owners on 48.6%.

Filing Trends in High Tech at the PTAB by Entity Type: Some 70.6% of the PTAB challenges in the high-tech industries for the first six months of 2025 were filed against NPEs.

District Court Patent Litigation by Industry Type over Time: For the first six months of 2025, 59.3% of the patent cases filed in district court involved the high-tech industry, while 13.1% were related to the medical industry.

PTAB Petitions by Industry Type over Time:  In the first six months of 2025, 71.2% of the PTAB petitions filed in the first six months were in the high-tech industry space, while 14.5% were related to the medical industry.

Infringement and Revocation Actions and Counterclaims in Unified Patent Court over Time: The 79 infringement actions filed in the Unified Patent Court in the first six months of 2025 are about half of number of the infringement actions filed in 2024, or 160.

Patent Dispute Report: 2024 in Review

Only lawyers benefit: Less than 4% of NPE gains reach inventors

The Perryman Group, in a recent economic study commissioned by Unified Edge, has found that less than 4% of the gains from patents sold to NPEs is realized by the original assignee. The findings reveal that selling a patent to an NPE is a highly inefficient mechanism for an original inventor to monetize its patents. The study suggests that other options, such as patent pools, are more likely to ensure that innovators reap the rewards for their contributions to new tech.

Download the economic study by click on the button below:

World’s 1st Wi-Fi Economic Report finds RAND royalty rate to be between $0.04 and $0.69

Unified Patents and The Brattle Group, a renowned group of economists and damages experts, announced its economic report on the reasonable and non-discriminatory (“RAND”) licensing value of patents essential to the Wi-Fi standard (“Standard Essential Patents” or “SEPs”). The full report is available exclusively to members of Unified Patents’ Wi-Fi Zone, which includes access to Unified’s ML-based objective patent landscaping analytics (“OPAL”) and indexed IEEE standardization technical submissions repository (“OPEN”).

Brattle calculated the range of reasonable and non-discriminatory (“RAND”) royalty rates for the universe of SEPs essential to implement the full capabilities of Wi-Fi, including up to Wi-Fi 6/6E, to be between $0.04 and $0.69. For the first time an economist calculated rates based on device capability requirements using downlink speed, latency, and a new power-saving capability implemented in Wi-Fi 6 called target wake time (“TWT”). Brattle concluded that Wi-Fi devices that utilize lesser capabilities should pay lower royalties, if any, because almost all SEPs necessary for those have expired.

Brattle calculated royalty rates on Wi-Fi using two independent observations. First, using court-established global RAND rates for Wi-Fi 4 (such as the 2013 Innovatio case) as a benchmark, taking into account incremental technological improvements in Wi-Fi 6/6E, declining production costs, current and evolving use case demands, and balanced bargaining theory, they concluded rates should be steadily declining. Second, a negotiated Wi-Fi 6/6E license between a licensor and a major hardware manufacturer. Both methods accounted for objective patent quality using court accepted measures such as adjusted patent forward citations. Unified’s OPAL analytics, which includes the world’s largest training set of manually evaluated Wi-Fi patents, was used to identify the individual SEPs in the landscape. In addition, Brattle calculated the stand-alone value of TWT.

For its report, Brattle interviewed industry participants and did independent research. It found Wi-Fi 4’s capabilities are sufficient for data-intensive use cases like video, gaming, and most virtual reality (“VR”). Brattle noted producer prices and consumer prices have been flat or falling for over a decade while computing and communications performance has improved by a factor of over 50 times.

The report is designed to be used for a top-down analysis of Wi-Fi RAND rates. Together with Unified’s OPAL analytics, the report can be used to calculate the RAND rate of any patent portfolio for Wi-Fi devices based on their capability requirements as well as for individual Wi-Fi capabilities. The report and OPAL provide Wi-Fi implementers a better understanding of the value of an asserted portfolio and enables them to make RAND counter offers in good faith. OPAL also enables the identification of individual patents in an asserted portfolio and provides a suite of quality metrics such as ML-based semantic similarity scoring and geographic and reputational value, forward citation, claim breadth, and statistical validity indexes.

The full report is available exclusively through Unified Patents. In addition to economic reports, Unified provides Objective Patent Landscapes (OPAL) for many standards, including Wi-Fi 6, with the world’s largest human evaluated training set, 3GPP LTE and 5G, HEVC, AVC, and others. Unified’s standard submission database, OPEN, allows users to access all contributions to major standards such as 3GPP, MPEG, IEEE, and IETF.

Download Unified Consulting’s Wi-Fi Economic Report slides presented at this year’s Corporate IP Strategy Conference in November.

Nearly $500 million in Economic Benefit From Fewer NHK-Fintiv Denials at the PTAB: Report

The Perryman Group, in a recent economic study commissioned by Unified Edge, has found that over the next 10 years, the total economic benefit of reducing discretionary denials of inter partes review proceedings under criteria such as the NHK-Fintiv rules will lead to an increase in US business activity of $482.1 million, $230.4 million in personal income, and approximately 2,000 job-years of employment.

Source: The Perryman Group

Conversely, any activity that would reinforce or ensconce those rules or other forms of discretionary denial edicts—i.e., a continuation of current practice—could cost the U.S. economy almost $500 million. 

The report, The Potential Economic Benefits of Recent Reductions in Discretionary Denial of Inter Partes Review Based on Criteria such as the NHK-Fintiv Rules (March 2023), was commissioned by Unified Edge in part to explore the as-yet unstudied economic impact the NHK-Fintiv criteria. It researches, organizes, and provides data-backed studies and evidence to further regulatory and policy goals, and works to keep the policymakers up to date and informed on ongoing policies, data, and the regulatory landscape to move the law forward in a just, reasoned, and evidence-based way.

Read the entire report HERE.