Overview
The key to an effective strategy is having a vision for how you are going to win the war, even if you lose individual battles. By adding the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) to a District Court judge and a jury as decision-makers considering critical issues, the client has the benefit of three independent shots at winning.
The objective is to build a strategy that's more than the sum of its parts. It needs to be something aimed at a result that your client really needs. If an attorney designs a client's strategy so that it's failure tolerant – there is a layered set of defenses – – then the client will benefit enormously from the seamless coordination of the district court litigation and the PTAB proceedings.
There are a lot of landmines out there for people who are not careful about coordinating what they're saying in the courtroom and what they're saying at the PTAB. If there's a sliver of daylight between your litigation positions and your PTAB positions, it's like Christmas for the other side.