Patent Lawyer Blog
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director has granted Director Review and vacated the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s decisions to institute two separate inter partes review (IPR) proceedings challenging the same patent claims in a dispute between CrowdStrike, Inc. and GoSecure, Inc.
Background of the Dispute
The case involves two IPR proceedings (IPR2025-00068 and IPR2025-00070) filed by CrowdStrike challenging Patent 9,954,872 B2 owned by GoSecure. CrowdStrike filed separate petitions primarily to present two different interpretations of the claim term “association,” a broader construction and a narrower construction.
The Director’s Ruling
Acting Under Secretary Coke Morgan Stewart determined that the Board abused its discretion by instituting both proceedings. The Director emphasized that “one petition should be sufficient to challenge the claims of a patent in most situations” and “multiple petitions by a petitioner are not necessary in the vast majority of cases,” citing the Board’s Consolidated Trial Practice Guide. The Director found that allowing multiple petitions for different claim constructions “effectively expands the permitted word count and places ‘a substantial and unnecessary burden on the Board and the patent owner and could raise fairness, timing, and efficiency concerns.’”
Key Issues with Multiple Petitions
Petitioner’s strategy involved filing two petitions with significant overlap, advancing five obviousness grounds in one petition under a broader interpretation of “association” and three obviousness grounds in another petition under a narrower interpretation. As the Patent Owner pointed out, “the two petitions assert eight different grounds with significant overlap.” The Board had originally justified instituting both proceedings because Patent Owner had not “weighed in on” the claim construction issue. However, the Director found this reasoning flawed, stating that “the proper course is to allow Patent Owner to submit whatever arguments are necessary for the panel to make a claim construction determination.”
Procedural Orders
The Director established a specific timeline for resolving the claim construction dispute:
- Patent Owner is authorized to file a 10-page brief explaining how the Board should construe “association” within 14 days
- Petitioner may file a five-page response brief within seven days of Patent Owner’s filing
- The Board must issue a decision on remand within 30 days of Petitioner’s brief deadline
Broader Implications
This decision reinforces the USPTO’s policy against allowing petitioners to effectively circumvent word count limitations and procedural constraints by filing multiple petitions targeting the same claims, particularly where there are different claim constructions as between the two petitions. The ruling aligns with the Board’s guidance that multiple petitions should be exceptional rather than routine practice. The case has been remanded to the Board to determine which of the two proceedings, if any, should be instituted after considering the parties’ claim construction arguments and construing the disputed claim term at issue.
The decision represents a significant procedural ruling that may influence how petitioners approach claim construction disputes in future IPR proceedings, emphasizing that the Board should resolve claim construction issues rather than allowing multiple proceedings to proceed in parallel using different claim constructions for the same claim terms.
The case was decided before Acting Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart. The decision is CrowdStrike, Inc. v. GoSecure, Inc., Case Nos. IPR2025-00068 and IPR2025-00070, Paper 25 (Order Granting Director Review, Vacating the Decisions Granting Institution, and Remanding to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board for Further Proceedings) (USPTO June 25, 2025).
The authors of www.PatentLawyerBlog.com are patent trial lawyers at Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell LLP. For more information about this case, contact Greg Cordrey at 949.623.7236 or GCordrey@jmbm.com.