Acting USPTO Director Stewart Issues First Decisions Under Interim Discretionary Denial Process

On Friday, May 16, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued discretionary denial decisions in the first four matters considered under the USPTO’s new interim workload management process.

In March, the USPTO announced a policy shift in the way it processes petitions for discretionary denials in PTAB proceedings. Under this new process, decisions on whether to institute inter partes review or post-grant review are now bifurcated into two steps: first, the Director determines whether discretionary denial is appropriate. If it is not, then the Director refers the matter to a three-judge PTAB panel that will issue a decision on whether to institute review on the merits. Prior to this change, a single panel evaluated both discretionary considerations and the merits of a petition simultaneously.

In her first four decisions, Acting USPTO Director Coke Morgan Stewart granted two requests for discretionary denial and rejected two.

• In Twitch Interactive, Inc. v. Razdog Holdings LLC, IPR2025-00307, IPR2025-00308, the patent owner’s request for denial was based on a parallel District Court proceeding that had no scheduled trial date. Acting Director Stewart denied the request for discretionary denial, noting that the earliest projected trial date (February 2027) was well after the projected final written decision date (July 30, 2026). The Director was also persuaded by the high likelihood of a stay in the District Court case.
• In Amazon.com v. NLGiken, Inc., IPR2025-00250, IPR2025-00407, the Director denied the patent owner’s request for denial based on projected time to trial, noting that time-to-trial statistics in the relevant District Court suggested trial would not take place until December 2026, well after the projected final written decision date of June 30, 2026.
• In Arm Ltd. and Mediattek, Inc. v. Daedalus Prime LLC, IPR2025-00207, the Director granted the request for discretionary denial based on similar time-to-trial projections. In this matter, the District Court case was projected to reach trial between March and May 2026 — well before the projected final written decision date of June 2026.
• In Ericsson and Verizon Wireless v. Procomm International, IPR2024-01455, the Director granted the request for discretionary denial, noting that the related District Court litigation was projected to conclude nine months before the projected final written decision date.

In these initial four decisions, Acting Director Stewart’s analysis focused heavily on time-to-trial considerations, placing great emphasis on whether the related District Court trial would occur before or after issuance of a final written decision. In both matters that were granted discretionary denial, Ericsson v. Procomm and ARM v. Daedalus, the petitioners offered Sotera stipulations, but the Director did not address these stipulations in her analyses, suggesting that stipulations may be less persuasive to the USPTO than they were under the previous framework.

We should see many more discretionary denial determinations in the coming days and weeks, which will help to further clarify the USPTO’s priorities and decision-making under this new framework. For more information on the interim process, read our analysis of the PTAB’s FAQs.