Patent Eligibility Case Analysis Tool

A flood of patent eligibility cases from district courts, the Federal Circuit, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has followed the Supreme Court’s June 2014 decision in Alice v. CLS Bank. These cases are reshaping patent eligibility case law, yet tracking their many findings can be daunting.

To help our clients easily access key takeaways from post-Alice patent eligibility decisions, Fenwick & West has created the Patent Eligibility Case Analysis Tool, an interactive visual representation of this changing case law landscape. This searchable tool provides short summaries of important post-Alice patent eligibility decisions and the court’s rationale for each key finding. Our list of decisions is not intended to be exhaustive. The number of decisions we have summarized has grown from dozens to hundreds, and is quickly approaching thousands. To make this tool most helpful, we will begin to be more selective in which decisions we report on, striving to highlight only the more important decisions and those that provide the best insight into the developing views of the USPTO and the courts.

Decisions are grouped first by whether the court invalidated or validated the patent claim(s) in question; categorized next by legal rationale, such as 'not abstract,' 'fundamental economic practice,' 'mental process,' etc.; and then presented chronologically by decision date. Each dot represents a decision. The dot colors indicate the type of tribunal—district court (purple), Federal Circuit (green), or USPTO (yellow)—that tried each case.

Filter the decisions displayed by entering a keyword in the Filter by Keywords field or by sliding the boxes on the Date Range slide bar.

For more information about how Fenwick assists clients in navigating successfully through this changing patent eligibility landscape, please visit these practice groups: