In this second installment of Docket Alarm’s Know Your PTAB Judge newsletter, we are proud to feature Judge Jennifer Bisk.

Judge Jennifer Bisk is a graduate of the George Mason University School of Law. Prior to law school, she obtained a Bachelor of Science in engineering, computer science, and electrical engineering from Vanderbilt, and a Master of Science in computer science from Stanford.

Judge Bisk has an extensive history clerking for various courts. She has served as a law clerk for the Hon. George W. Miller at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims and then for the Hon. Richard Linn at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. During law school, she was a judicial intern for the Hon. Randall R. Rader at the Federal Circuit and also for the Hon. Stephen S. Mitchell at U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

In addition to her clerking experience, Judge Bisk also has patent experience in both transactional matters, at Cooley, Godward and Kronish, and in litigation at Crowell & Moring and at Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox.

The Honorable Jennifer Bisk was sworn in to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board on March 1, 2012. During her tenure on the court, she has issued an impressive 35 final written decisions— canceling all instituted claims in 17 petitions, canceling some claims in eight petitions, and refusing to cancel any instituted claims in 13 petitions.

Notable rulings include Judge Bisk’s written decision against instituting a petition for Inter Partes Review (IPR) filed by IBM against known patent aggregator Intellectual Ventures. IPR 2014-00681. The patent at issue involves an intrusion-detecting security system. Judge Bisk’s decision went through IBM’s five alleged grounds of unpatentability (citing 35 U.S.C. §§ 102 and 103), which relied on four different examples of prior art. Ultimately, the court determined that IBM did not show a reasonable likelihood that it would prevail on demonstrating the unpatentability of any of the challenged claims, and refuted all five grounds of IBM’s challenge.

Further insight can be gained by viewing Judge Bisk’s record on Docket Alarm’s statistics platform. Users can view statistics on how many petitions Judge Bisk is hearing per month, petitions she has instituted, final written decisions she has issued, and the parties and firms that have appeared before her, and much more. For example, based on analysis of her 35 final written decisions, Judge Bisk is, on average, 49% less likely to invalidate all instituted claims than her fellow administrative patent judges. However, in the last three months, she has canceled all claims in 67% of final written decisions issued. Recently, Judge Bisk has been considerably less busy— she has heard only one petition in the past three months.

Lawyers representing both petitioners and patent owners can use this information to determine what direction their litigation strategies need to take, such as whether or not to file a petition and what claims to contest if appearing before Judge Bisk.

- Search all documents filed in all of Judge Bisk’s cases at the PTAB.
- View Judge Bisk’s judicial profile, with statistics on petition grant rates and other data.