Q4 in Review: USPTO Pushes Further IPR Limits as FRAND Jurisdictional Battle Intensifies

Patent litigation was up by nearly 16% in 2025. NPE filings went up by almost 19% compared to 2024, with litigation from operating companies coming in 11% higher.

As filings continue to swing upward, many defendants now have fewer opportunities to challenge validity following changes at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that have steadily decreased the availability of America Invents Act (AIA) reviews. Interim processes adopted earlier in 2025 have greatly expanded the use of discretionary denials, prompting repeated appellate challenges. That shift plus a newer, even more restrictive institution process handled entirely by USPTO Director John Squires have caused institution rates to drop and pushed the filing of PTAB challenges down, close to historic lows, in Q4. A rulemaking proposal to further limit access to AIA reviews could accelerate these trends.

Meanwhile, the patent enforcement space in Europe has seen significant upheaval this past year, including through a ruling that has given EU national courts and the Unified Patent Court (UPC) the ability to decide infringement claims arising far beyond their borders—a power that the UPC has wielded broadly. An ongoing fight over jurisdiction in disputes over standard essential patents (SEPs) also escalated over the course of 2025, reaching a boiling point over UK decisions declaring that SEP owners must offer interim fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) licenses—which has triggered an increasingly contentious back-and-forth with the UPC and a top German court. Moreover, as the withdrawal of a controversial SEP regulation in Europe has led to further conflict, the US took steps to weigh new SEP-related changes.

Q4 also saw further activity over US legislative proposals, including several hearings on bills to reform Section 101 or regulate third‑party litigation funding (TPLF). Notably, a TPLF-related bill advanced from a congressional committee for the first time, though the vote reflected a sharp partisan split over disclosure requirements—and an unexpected alliance between Democrats and conservative policy groups. RPX has also flagged instances of high-volume patent plaintiffs appearing to ignore disclosure obligations.

Finally, late in Q4, the USPTO resumed its release of patent assignments to the public, revealing assignments to entities notable in light of their litigation history (or that of their corporate parents) and/or the involvement of TPLF.

Download Full Report (PDF)

RPX members are exclusively invited to join a live RPX Community webinar covering highlights from this report. Live sessions are scheduled to accommodate US, European, and APAC time zones starting on January 22 (US session). This webinar may be eligible for CLE credit in some states. See here to register or for more details.

In the fourth quarter, NPEs added 524 defendants, or 7% more than Q4 2024—exceeding the trailing three-quarter Q4 average for 2022-2024 by 10%, but staying essentially flat compared to Q3 2025. Meanwhile, operating companies added 344 defendants in Q4, a 26% increase compared to the fourth quarter last year. Operating company filings last quarter were also 26% higher than in Q3 2025 and were 10% greater than the trailing Q4 average.

Overall, patent plaintiffs added 868 defendants in the fourth quarter of 2025, or 13% more than in Q4 2024 and 8% more than Q3 2025, also beating the trailing average by 10%.

Additionally, the operating company data above leave out another distinct category of litigation filed by a small group of design and utility patent owners targeting copycats and counterfeiters selling products online. RPX excludes such “e-seller” cases from analyses of district court litigation because they tend to follow a different dynamic compared to what one might consider the usual patent suit. These e-seller cases sometimes name hundreds of defendant entities, many of which may be merely online storefronts or aliases for the same ultimate parent. Also, plaintiffs primarily seek injunctive relief instead of damages, and their cases often end with the e-seller defendant’s failure to answer, followed by a default judgment.

This category of litigation is shown in grey below to illustrate its magnitude. As shown by the rightmost bar, e-seller litigation in Q4 2025 accounted for 928 defendants added, or 52% of all litigation during the quarter. As was also the case in Q3, this represents a much lower volume of e-seller litigation than in recent quarters past. While the lower counts for Q3 and Q4 are still subject to the caveat about defendants potentially having multiple online storefronts, as noted above, the decrease could also be related to efforts by some judges to apply stricter procedural rules to e-seller cases, as detailed in RPX’s Q3 in Review: In the Northern District of Illinois, by far the top venue for such litigation, District Judge John F. Kness issued an August 2025 order that criticized the “deluge” of such litigation, finding that these cases stretch the bounds of procedural rules “past their breaking point”. Because these cases routinely award preliminary injunctive relief without adversarial proceedings, involve widespread sealing, and rely upon improper mass joinder of defendants, Judge Kness held that the plaintiffs here should instead obtain the relief sought “by other means”.

The District of New Jersey appears to be following suit: On September 25, Chief Judge Renée Marie Bumb issued an order requiring e-seller plaintiffs to specifically and plausibly allege personal jurisdiction, including the contacts of each named defendant with the forum—stating that “[t]he law is well-settled that simply being an online seller on Amazon isn’t enough”. The order also limits each e-seller complaint to a “single defendant or group of defendants acting under the same operator”.

Apart from the following graph, the other analyses in this report exclude pure design patent and e-seller litigation.

The top three rankings were nearly identical in each category for the fourth quarter, except with the Northern District of Illinois taking second place for operating company litigation instead of the District of New Jersey.

Given the volume of Eastern District of Texas patent litigation, it is perhaps not surprising that six of the ten largest patent damage awards of 2025 were returned by East Texas juries. Those six trials produced damage awards ranging from $78.5M to $445.5M, covering technologies including cellular networking and mobile devices, display panels, smart home appliances, and targeted advertising.

As many of those verdicts came late in 2025, fewer enhancements (e.g., by tacking on interest) or reductions (e.g., by ruling in favor of a defendant on a posttrial motion) have yet materialized.

See here for RPX coverage of the year’s top damage awards.

–  Judge Gilstrap Still on Top, but Judge Albright Stays in the News

The top district judge for patent litigation in 2025 was Eastern District of Texas Judge Rodney Gilstrap, who oversaw 19% of all new patent litigation this past year (and presided over five of the six East Texas trials noted above).

Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright tied for third place with Eastern District of Texas Judge Robert W. Schroeder III this past year. In Q4, Judge Albright fell just short of the top five.

Judge Albright, a former patent litigator who took the bench in the Waco Division in 2018, drew scrutiny and criticism for openly seeking to attract patent litigation to his courtroom—both through outreach and through a series of rule changes designed to streamline patent cases. Those efforts were enabled by permissive divisional filing rules that allowed plaintiffs to file cases in specific divisions within a district—thus guaranteeing that plaintiffs would get Judge Albright by filing in Waco, where he is the only district judge. As a result, Judge Albright became the nation’s top patent judge by an increasingly large margin and held that status for years.

However, Judge Albright was then knocked out of first place by rule changes made by his district’s chief judge in 2022 that explicitly targeted the concentration of patent litigation in his court—requiring that all Waco patent cases be randomly assigned among a larger group of judges, including Judge Albright. Though Judge Albright continued to be assigned a disproportionate share of cases in existing campaigns in the wake of the order, his patent docket nonetheless dwindled.

While Judge Albright may no longer play as large of a role in terms of litigation volume, headline-grabbing developments have nonetheless continued to play out in his courtroom.

A notable recent example came in the West Texas leg of a larger saga involving litigation misconduct from a prolific but embattled patent attorney, William P. Ramey III of Ramey LLP. The past few years have seen a growing number of district courts shift attorney fees against Ramey, his firm, and various plaintiffs under their representation for pursuing substantively weak file-and-settle cases. In one such lawsuit, filed by mCom IP, LLC against Cisco, the defendant filed a motion in December 2023 that sought both $73K in attorney fees but also a novel nonmonetary sanction: a prefiling injunction that would bar Ramey from bringing any patent cases in West Texas without permission.

Two years later, on December 18, 2025, Judge Albright finally ruled and granted the motion—barring Ramey or his firm from bringing any patent infringement suits in the entire Western District without leave from a West Texas judge, the Fifth Circuit, or a “delegee thereof”, citing Ramey’s history of filing meritless cases and his repeated failure to perform adequate pre-suit investigations or attend hearings. Ramey has appealed the order to the Federal Circuit, as well as filing an emergency motion for a partial stay.

More on this latest chapter in the Ramey saga can be found here.

Meanwhile, as the year approached its end, Judge Albright also played a role in an unprecedented dispute triggered by a significant ruling that greatly expanded the reach of European courts. Earlier this year, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) held in BSH Hausgeräte v. Electrolux that both national courts in EU countries as well as the Unified Patent Court (UPC) may decide claims of infringement over patents issued non-EU countries (as detailed further in the UPC Update section below). This led one plaintiff, Onesta IP LLC, to file in early October what appears to be the first-ever case to assert US patents in a German court, targeting automaker BMW in the Munich I Regional Court over the provision of vehicles that (per BMW) include “Qualcomm Snapdragon-System[s]-on-Chip (SoC) with an integrated Adreno-GPU”. That defendant then filed suit in the Western District of Texas on December 15, in part seeking a declaratory judgment that by enforcing the patents outside the US and seeking damages reaching further back than the six years allowed under the US Patent Act (back to April 2018), Onesta IP has misused the two patents-in-suit such that they are unenforceable.

That same day, BMW filed a motion for an ex parte temporary restraining order (TRO) and anti-suit injunction (ASI): The ASI would bar Onesta IP from further litigating the US patents in Munich, from filing an anti-anti-suit injunction in Munich (i.e., one that would prevent BMW from seeking this relief in Texas), and from seeking a preliminary injunction in Munich against BMW; the ASI would also order the NPE to indemnify BMW for any associated costs of litigating its US patents in Munich. The TRO would preserve the status quo while the ASI was pending.

On December 16, Judge Albright granted BMW’s motion for a TRO, setting the amount for a security at USD$0. Then, on December 30, Judge Albright extended the TRO until January 13, setting a hearing for that same day.

In the leadup to that hearing, Onesta IP indicated it would not further escalate the jurisdictional back-and-forth between the two venues—notifying Judge Albright on January 8 that it “does not intend to request an AASI from the Munich court”.

Nonetheless, Judge Albright ruled against Onesta IP at the January 13 hearing and converted the TRO into an ASI, barring the patent owner from proceeding with its German cases: IAM reports that according to BMW’s counsel, Judge Albright emphasized that the “right to a jury is sacrosanct” (as paraphrased by IAM). Onesta IP has stated that it plans to seek an emergency appeal from the Federal Circuit, IAM additionally reports.

See here for more on BSH, plaintiff Onesta IP, and its German case against BMW.

Plaintiffs filing litigation in this sector during the fourth quarter included several related to known patent monetization firms and licensors. In mid-November, OptimNet LLC, a Texas NPE linked to Korean monetization firm IP T&A Co., Ltd. (apparently d/b/a Intellectual Property Transaction and Analysis), launched a new campaign over various cloud services over patents exclusively licensed from the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), a Korean research institution. Earlier that month, Connected Orange LLC—a plaintiff controlled by Texas-based Equip IP Management LLC—filed its inaugural complaint targeting mobile devices that utilize certain mobile payment services, among other products. Public records indicate that the plaintiff filed suit after obtaining litigation funding, the second plaintiff linked to Equip IP known to have done so after NeoLayer LLC.

Nearby Systems LLC, a plaintiff associated with Texas monetization firm Empire IP LLC, also expanded its ongoing campaign in late October with two more cases against mobile apps with features related to displaying maps and locating banks or stores. Additionally, Arlington Technologies, LLC, a subsidiary of Texas-based Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC, filed litigation in late October over AI-based systems and services focused on avatar, character, and assistant creation as well as video, audio, and speech processing. Also, WirelessWERX IP LLC—an NPE associated with Dynamic IP Deals, LLC (d/b/a DynaIP) and affiliated entity Pueblo Nuevo LLC—filed new cases targeting various platforms and products with geofencing functionality in early October.

Other plaintiffs hitting this space in Q4 included several plaintiffs linked to some familiar individuals engaged in patent monetization. Those include former IP Navigation Group, LLC (d/b/a IPNav) head Erich Spangenberg, whose newest monetization outlet, SIM IP, filed its first US suit through subsidiary Friendship IP Protection LLC (f/k/a SIM IP 6 LLC) in mid-December, targeting social media platforms. In mid-November, Texas NPE Congruent Media Resourcing LLC also began litigating a former OpenPeak patent against providers of cybersecurity products with secure application technology. That plaintiff is controlled by two individuals linked to a growing web of other plaintiffs, including Optimum Vector Dynamics LLC, VE Opening LLC, and Vision Sphere Labs LLC.

Additionally, in early November, Adaptive Classification Technologies LLC kicked off its first campaign with two complaints against providers of e-discovery platforms with predictive coding and text analytics features. That plaintiff is managed by a patent attorney who was previously much more active in the patent monetization space but appears to be gearing up once again, judging by the assignment of patents earlier in 2025 to two other entities under his control—Atomic IP LLC and Vision Augmentation Technology LLC—that have yet to file litigation.

Also suing over various products in this sector were a group of New Mexico plaintiffs linked to a patent monetization professional who appears to be linked to a growing number of other litigating NPEs: DynaMuse LLC, which in mid-November started a campaign over music streaming platforms with various features related to media organization and playback control; SynchroFi LLC, which began a campaign over various online platforms with two-factor authentication features in late October; UpChat LLC, which filed its first litigation over mobile ordering apps with phone number authentication and delivery tracking features, also in late October; and Tesseract Systems LLC, which filed its second case in early October, targeting neural network training frameworks.

Still more plaintiffs filing E-Commerce and Software Litigation in Q4 were several inventor-controlled NPEs: Primos Storage Technology LLC targeted cloud service infrastructure in a late-December complaint; BenedorTSE LLC filed suits over secure payment apps and services in mid-November and late December; Adaptive Avenue Associates, Inc. tagged another company over its website’s slideshow features in late November; and iScan2D Technologies, LLC launched a campaign targeting wearables with certain user interface features related to device pairing in early November.

–  Changes at PTAB Trigger Drop in Institution Rates—Especially Under Squires

The PTAB instituted trial in 41% of the AIA review petitions addressed in Q4, compared to 65% in Q4 2024 and just 23% in Q3 2024.

However, the overall institution rate for the quarter only tells part of the story, given recent changes to the processes and substantive factors governing institution at the PTAB—changes that have increasingly limited access to AIA review, and are likely driving the downturn in new petitions as well.

In February, then-Acting USPTO Director Coke Morgan Stewart withdrew guidance issued in 2022 by former USPTO Director Kathi Vidal that had limited discretionary denials based on the status of parallel litigation under the NHK-Fintiv rule. Soon after, Stewart implemented an interim two-stage process in which she would decide requests for discretionary denial, rather than a panel of PTAB administrative patent judges (APJs) making that determination. Under that interim process, Stewart followed an approach allowing discretionary denials based on a broader set of factors—including a controversial one allowing denials for petitions against patents longer in force based on the “settled expectations” of the parties. Only if Stewart determined no discretionary denial was warranted would the acting director then refer the petition to a PTAB panel for consideration of the merits and nondiscretionary factors.

As a result of these changes, the AIA review institution rate steadily declined—from 68% in Q1 to 42% in Q2 and just 23% in Q3.

Then, on October 17, recently confirmed USPTO Director John Squires announced that he would now handle the entire AIA review institution process, including both discretionary denials and the merits/nondiscretionary factors—making those determinations with no accompanying written decisions in most cases. Squires explained that the new process was necessary in part to eliminate the “appearance of self-interest” resulting from workload structures that based APJs’ compensation in part on the number of trials they instituted, and to “[e]nhance transparency and public trust through a single line of authority”.

Squires has rarely instituted petitions decided under this new process, doing so in just 27 of the 196 petitions decided in Q4—resulting in an institution rate of just 14%. The director has issued those institution decisions almost entirely through a series of consolidated summary notices that address numerous, often unrelated IPRs in bulk. Squires has explained his reasoning only for a handful of petitions, including four petitions discretionarily denied in light of the director’s November 3 precedential decision in Revvo Technologies v. Cerebrum Sensor Technologies (IPR2025-00632), which allows such denials where petitioners take inconsistent positions on claim construction between district courts and the USPTO. The director made this determination for three of those petitions, all filed by three baby stroller makers against Baby Jogger, in a footnote within a larger December 1 summary order (reversing his prior decision to refer those petitions to the PTAB); and in a separate order denying an IPR filed by Caption Health.

Apart from the Caption Health denial, Squires has only issued full decisions in rulings that reversed prior institution decisions. For instance, in two Google IPRs against Bootler, LLC, he discretionarily denied institution (revisiting a prior referral to the PTAB after the petitioner, which initially did not request discretionary denial, did so after circumstances changed) because the district court had, in a parallel case, found the challenged claims patent-ineligible under Section 101 (a practice that was challenged in an unsuccessful mandamus petition filed by HighLevel, as detailed further below). In another IPR filed by Tesla against Intellectual Ventures LLC, Squires overturned a PTAB panel’s August decision to institute trial after criticizing Tesla for taking inconsistent positions on claim construction.

Despite the 14% institution rate for petitions for which Squires decided institution, the overall institution rate for Q4 was higher at 41% for two reasons: First, the Squires-led institution process only took effect on October 20, so the Q4 rate includes petitions already referred by Stewart for which panels made the ensuing merits institution decisions while the interim institution process was still in effect. Second, the new process only covers petitions not yet filed or instituted by that date, and establishes that petitions that Stewart had already referred to a panel for the merits prong of the interim institution process would remain with those panels—so a number of post-October 20 institution decisions were made by panels addressing the merits of petitions referred by Stewart.

It is also worth mentioning that in the memorandum in which Squires announced his takeover of the institution process, he remarked that the bifurcated interim process introduced in March, while “smart and necessary”, had an unintended consequence—explaining that for the decisions that Stewart referred to PTAB panels for evaluation on the merits, an “extraordinarily high” number of those were then instituted (“at one point exceeding 95 percent”).

–  Federal Circuit Rejects Challenges to Discretionary Denial Practices

The Federal Circuit has meanwhile rejected a series of mandamus petitions challenging the USPTO’s various discretionary denial changes, all brought by petitioners with AIA review petitions that were either denied institution or de-instituted under those updated standards.

On November 6, the appellate court denied three petitions for mandamus review from Motorola Solutions, SAP, and Alphabet (Google) and Samsung, rejecting arguments that by withdrawing the 2022 Vidal guidance and applying more restrictive standards retroactively, the agency violated the petitioners’ due process rights, also declining to hold that the changes were procedurally invalid for being implemented without notice-and-comment rulemaking. Then, on December 9, the appellate court applied similar reasoning to reject an additional trio of petitions, including two (one filed by SanDisk Technologies and Western Digital, and the other by Cambridge Industries) protesting the “settled expectations” factor and another (filed by HighLevel) that fought a Fintiv denial based on a district court’s invalidation of the patent at issue under Alice. Seven other mandamus proceedings contesting various aspects of the USPTO’s discretionary denial practices remain active, including one from Volkswagen focused on a separation of powers argument.

The Federal Circuit will also soon be considering a challenge to the USPTO’s discretionary denial practices through the normal appeals process, rather than ones that seek the “extraordinary” remedy of mandamus review. In Verizon v. Omega Patents, a PTAB panel issued a final written decision that invalidated all petitioned claims from the patent at issue, but then-Acting Director Stewart vacated the final written decision (rather than reversing it) in June 2025—holding in part that further proceedings would be inefficient because the patent had already been subjected to seven patentability challenges, including another successful IPR also on appeal. Now-Director Squires sought to dismiss petitioner Verizon’s appeal for lack of jurisdiction, arguing in part that because the final written decision has been vacated there is nothing that may be appealed. Verizon countered that this position amounts to an “unlawful . . . attempt to elude” the Federal Circuit’s jurisdiction.

On December 9, the appellate court denied the USPTO’s motion to dismiss along with one from the patent owner, ordering the parties to instead address those issues in their merits briefs. Squires has in the meantime continued the practice of vacating final written decisions rather than reversing them, doing so on October 9 for an Interactive Communications IPR in which a panel had invalidated claims from a Blackhawk Network patent.

–  Rulemaking Proposal Floats Further Limits on AIA Reviews

On October 17, the same day that Squires took over AIA review institution, the USPTO also published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that would further limit access to the PTAB. The proposed rules would bar AIA review institution unless petitioners stipulate not to raise invalidity challenges under Section 102 or 103 in parallel litigation, where the parallel forum would likely address validity on that basis before the PTAB issues its final written decision, or where the patent’s validity has already been upheld by another forum.

The NPRM, which seeks to implement these rules through revisions to the PTAB’s rules of practice, also details a series of policy rationales that underpin the USPTO’s proposed changes. In part, the USPTO argues that IPRs have ceased to be a true “alternative” to district court litigation as contemplated by Congress for the AIA. The agency further highlights the practice of “serial or parallel” IPRs, asserting that this can be “wasteful” by forcing the relitigation of validity issues already considered, or being considered in parallel, by the USPTO, district courts, and the International Trade Commission (ITC).

Public comments submitted by the December 2 deadline included feedback from a number of notable petitioner-defendants—many of which argued that the proposed stipulation requirement would violate the statutory estoppel provisions of the AIA, and that restrictions based on prior determinations of validity improperly exceed AIA provisions that only limit IPRs from the same petitioner or real party in interest. Some also assert that the suggested limitations regarding parallel validity challenges run counter to the statutory one-year time window from the date of service within which district court defendants may file PTAB petitions.

In contrast, certain licensors, NPEs, and other entities engaged in patent monetization offered support for the NPRM, variously characterizing the stipulation requirement as helping to fulfill Congress’s intent for AIA reviews to serve as a true “alternative” to district court litigation, and the proposed limits for patents with prior validity determinations as supporting what they identified as Congress’s desire that the AIA establish “quiet title” to patents. Meanwhile, the USPTO also received a letter in support of its proposal from some of the cosponsors of a PTAB reform bill before Congress—and a competing letter opposing the proposal from former legislators that either voted for the AIA or have since supported it.

More on those public comments and on the NPRM itself are available here.

–  Reexams Spike Further as IPR Limits Further Tighten

As the USPTO continues to make changes limiting access to AIA review, petitioners have responded by filing more and more ex parte reexaminations—which, while slower than IPRs, are not subject to discretionary denials to the same extent.

RPX has previously noted how the popularity of reexams has tended to climb in response to policy shifts that constrain IPR access: In 2020, the year that the Fintiv decision was designed as precedential, the number of requests for ex parte reexam increased by 21%, and then by 53% in 2021. While they held steady at about 330 requests per year in 2022 (the year Vidal issued the just-overturned guidance limiting NHK-Fintiv) and 2023, they surged by 27% in 2024 (following a decision by Vidal, in CommScope v. Dali Wireless, that limited the “compelling merits” exception then in effect under the 2022 guidance).

Reexams peaked yet again in 2025: Following a more muted first quarter, reexam requests climbed by 32% in Q2 (during which Stewart withdrew Vidal’s restrictions on Fintiv) compared to the same quarter last year, then swung up by 39% in Q3 and spiked by 119% in Q4. As a result, reexam filings were up by 49% for the year as a whole.

Also, data indicate that the share of patents with reexam requests that have also been litigated in district court has continued to climb—reaching 71% in 2025, up from 54% last year. Data additionally show that the amount of patents for which defendants have also requested IPRs has begun to swing back upward, following a steady downward slide: After peaking at 36% in 2021 and decreasing to 33% in 2022, 24% in 2023, and 20% in 2024, this share climbed to 29% in 2025.