Six years after the America Invents Act created inter partes review proceedings, patent disputes increasingly involve parallel litigation, with at least one inter partes review proceeding in tandem with district court litigation(s) involving the same patent claims. Given the frequency with which IPRs are utilized as parallel means of resolving patent disputes, rather than as an alternative to district court litigation, the question that practitioners are starting to face with some regularity is whether, and to what extent, IPR decisions are admissible in district court litigation.

Originally published in Law360 - August 7, 2018.