The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) has come under fire from patent owners since virtually the beginning of its existence. Once predicted to handle between 450 to 500 challenges a year, between April 1, 2024, and March 31, 2025, the PTAB received 1,395 petitions. At this level, the number of challenges is roughly triple the number of challenges predicted at the dawn of the PTAB era. And this rate of post grant challenges has remained largely constant since FY 2019, ranging between 1,292 in FY 2024 to a high of 1,513 in FY 2020. In earlier years, it was common to have at least several hundred more challenges filed, with peak years being FY 2017 (1,901 challenges) and FY 2015 (1,897 challenges), both years which were close to quadruple the number of predicted challenges.

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