UniCourt Product Release – New Data for Patent Trial and Appeal Board

Data is the underlying fuel for innovative businesses, and at UniCourt, our mission is to use our Legal Data APIs to provide our clients bulk access to the court data they need. We are committed to improving access to court records from state and federal (PACER) courts across the United States. Through our public case pages and free online search engines, we provide the public with access to millions of cases and billions of data points throughout the American legal system.

Last month, we announced that we onboarded Arkansas state courts into UniCourt’s legal database. We’re excited to share that this month, we’ve onboarded records for the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), an administrative body of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In addition to the PTAB, we also provide real-time access to court records for the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, the tribunal to which parties can appeal decisions of the PTAB. This release means that UniCourt now provides court coverage for cases appealed from the PTAB to the Court of Appeals, and all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. 

Sanctioned by statute and composed of judges with highly technical backgrounds, the PTAB reviews cases rejected by patent examiners within the USPTO. Litigants can seek the PTAB’s review when they believe the rejection was erroneous, and the PTAB, in turn, issues a decision either affirming or reversing the patent rejection. The PTAB also conducts trials under the America Invents Act (AIA), which provides an alternative to traditional U.S. District Court litigation. In many of these cases, a member of the general public can challenge the patentability of claims. In the past year, the PTAB adjudicated more than 2,000 appeals in the business method/mechanical categories, as well as appeals in the pharma, chemical, electrical, and design industries. Approximately 59.8 percent of appeals were affirmed.

For all of this newly onboarded data, our clients can use UniCourt’s user-friendly interface and easy to use case filtering tools to locate detailed information on parties, attorneys, and judges, as well as docket information on new filings. They can also download PTAB documents on-demand and leverage our auto-document download feature to streamline the process of accessing the most current information as soon as it breaks.

Benefits for UniCourt clients extend beyond our most popular features, from our case tracking tools to our automated court searches and case exports: our clients can also take advantage of our industry leading Legal Data APIs to download all of the PTAB data they need in bulk. Through integrating with our suite of APIs, our clients can get the data they need directly routed to their internal matter management systems, CRMs, databases, and data lakes to power their business development and intelligence, analytics, machine learning models, process automation, and much more.

In the coming weeks, we will be onboarding the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB), so stay tuned for new developments! Follow UniCourt on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to stay apprised of these and other new releases.

• Share on