Post-Grant for Practitioners: Multiple Parties, Multiple Petitions – Multiple Practice Tips

Fish Principals Dorothy Whelan and Karl Renner discussed multiple parties and multiple petitions in post-grant proceedings, and offered practical tips for both patent owners and petitioners. To date, these issues have arisen primarily in the tech area. However, they will become increasingly important in the life sciences, particularly in biosimilars. Topics included:

• Multiple parties filing a single petition vs. individual petitions
• Real party in interest and privity issues
• Joinder and consolidation issues
• Timing issues where there are multiple potential filers
• Redundancy when filing multiple petitions