CrowdStrike, Inc. v. GoSecure, Inc., Nos. IPR2025-00068, -00070 (June 25, 2025) (designated informative on June 26, 2025). Order by Stewart, Acting Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Acting Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board granted institution of two IPR proceedings initiated by CrowdStrike against a patent owned by GoSecure. GoSecure then filed a request for Director Review of the Board’s decisions granting institution, arguing that the Board abused its discretion by instituting two proceedings against the same claims of the same patent without exceptional circumstances justifying that result.
Acting Director Stewart granted Director Review and agreed with GoSecure that “the Board abused its discretion in granting institution of two petitions challenging the same claims in this instance.”
In the petitions, CrowdStrike had pursued two different constructions of a claim term—a broader construction and a narrower construction. CrowdStrike advanced five obviousness grounds under the broader interpretation in one of the petitions and three obviousness grounds under the narrower interpretation in the other petition. This resulted in two petitions that together “assert eight different grounds with significant overlap,” which “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.”
Acting Director Stewart noted that under the Board’s Consolidated Trial Practice Guide, “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.” Thus, here “the Board should have construed the claim term at issue and instituted review of, at most, one of the petitions.”
Accordingly, Acting Director Stewart vacated the institution decisions and ordered the parties to submit briefing on the disputed claim term, after which the Board should “determine which of the two proceedings, if any, to institute.”