In early September we released our IPR Intelligence Report 2021, the fifth in an annual series where we covered all stakeholders in IPR proceedings during the last five years. We provided high-level statistics related to all parties involved, cases, patents, claims as well as we ranked IPR firms, attorneys, petitioners, patent owners and judges under different categories (Petitioner, Patent Owner, and Overall) based on their activity and performance. Today we are going to cover some of the best attorneys involved in the 7,582 IPR challenges filed during the period of our study.

The 2021 report analyzes the IPR cases which were filed from July 1, 2016 through June 30, 2021, using the latest updates for the cases as of August 20, 2021. A total of 7,582 IPR petitions were filed which marks a 1.6 percent decline over the 7,708 cases filed in the previous
period (July 1, 2015, through June 30, 2020) that we evaluated in IPR Intelligence Report 2020. The IPRs were filed to challenge 5,087 unique patents and 80,831 unique claims. 930 law firms and a total of 5,341 attorneys represented 2,658 companies, involved in one or more IPRs, as patent owners or petitioners.

The full report dives further into the cases, number of patents and claims by analyzing them from different angles as well as offering insight over the most popular IPC codes. Furthermore, an Excel document offers the full rankings based on activity and performance of law firms, attorneys and companies that participated in the IPR cases in the period of our study. The report is available to all Patexia Concierge members but can also be separately purchased on the Patexia website here.

Earlier during October we published Patexia Insight 117 where we revealed some of the top IPR law firms. Here in no particular order we will cover some of the top IPR attorneys of 2021 ranked by their performance, activity or both. Being named among the top 50 is a significant achievement for these attorneys as it means they are in fact, in the top one percent out of more than 5,000 attorneys.

Matthew A. Argenti of Wilson Sonsini is the best performing attorney representing patent owners. He has represented Align Technology, Inc. and California Institute of Technology.
James M. Glass again from Quinn Emanuel is the 5th most active attorney overall representing 122 patent owners and 94 petitioners. Alacritech, Inc. and BlackBerry were his top clients.
Theodoros Konstantakopoulos of Desmarais is the 11th best performing attorney overall. Intel and Monterey Research, LLC are his top two clients.
Michael T. Rosato from Wilson Sonsini ranked the 17th most active overall. He patent owners and petitioners 68 and 77 times respectively. Viatris Inc. and Align Technology, Inc. are his top clients.
Kevin P. B. Johnson of Quinn Emanuel is the 16th best performing attorney in the overall category. He has represented Samsung in this period.
Babak Tehranchi from Perkins Coie ranked the 21st best performing attorney for patent owners. His top clients include IMPINJ Inc. and Lexmark International.
Lori Ann Gordon from Perkins Coie ranked the 27th most active attorney when it comes to representing petitioners. She has worked with Apple and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
Henry August Petri from Polsinelli is the 13th best performing attorney representing petitioners with Halliburton Company as his top client.
Harper S. Batts of Sheppard Mullin ranked the 39th best performing for the petitioners. Netflix is his top client.
Christopher T. L. Douglas of Alston & Bird is the 14th best performing attorney overall with Nokia and Getinge Group being his main clients. He was also ranked the 35th most active attorney representing patent owners in 46 cases and petitioners in 68.
Adam P. Seitz of Erise IP represented petitioners in 80 cases. He ranked the 22nd most active attorney for petitioners. Apple was his top client with 68 cases.
Richard F. Giunta of Wolf Greenfield representing 53 patent owners and 58 petitioners. He was ranked the 39th most active attorney in the overall category. Google and IP Bridge were his main clients.
Heath J. Briggs from Greenberg Traurig was ranked the 43rd most active attorney when it came to representing petitioners. He mainly worked with Limelight Networks and Satco Products, Inc.
Kerry S. Taylor of Knobbe Martens is the 23rd best performing attorney for the petitioners He represented ASM IP HOLDING B.V. and Illumina, Inc.
David L. McCombs from Haynes & Boone was ranked the 4th most active for representing petitioners. Cisco Systems was his top client.
Nicholas T. Peters with 63 cases from Fitch Even was ranked the 45th most active attorney for the patent owners. His main client was Lone Star Silicon Innovations LLC.

Methodology

Our ranking methodology has been optimized based on the feedback we continuously receive from the IP community which helps us to improve and make the reports more useful to everybody, including our law firm and corporate partners.

1. Success and Performance Scores: The performance score is a weighted average of Success and Activity scores. This performance ranking helps companies find the highly active and highly successful law firms and attorneys (i.e., the most qualified ones).
In order to make this ranking and score meaningful, attorneys need to have at least 30 concluded (non-pending) cases or a minimum of 15 concluded cases to be included in the Patent Owner/Petitioner Performance or Success Rankings.

2. Success Score calculation: We only considered non-pending cases (concluded) with one of the following three statuses: Terminated-Denied, Terminated-Settled and Final Written Decision. The following table summarizes how the points were allocated to each party or representative:

Status	PO Success Points	Petitioner Success Points
Terminated-Denied	1 Point	0 Point
Terminated-Settled	0.25 Point	0.75 Point
FWD Entered	Claims Valid / Claims Listed	Claims Invalidated / Claims Listed

If the petition has challenged 10 claims for example, but only 3 of them were invalidated after receiving the Final Written Decision, the attorney or law firm representing the petitioner will receive 3 out of 10 or 0.3 points, while the attorney or law firm representing the patent owner will receive 7/10 or 0.7 points for that case.

3. Activity Score: It’s understandable that the company’s in-house counsel would prefer to hire somebody with more activity and experience in recent years over somebody who was active five years ago. As a result, we have updated and improved the Activity Score giving a higher weight to more recent cases compared to older cases. Under this model, an attorney who was involved in a total of 50 cases back in 2016 is ranked lower than another attorney with the same 50 cases but distributed over a 5-year period.

Stay tuned as in the following weeks we plan to cover some of the best CAFC attorneys and law firms in 2021 with data from our latest CAFC Intelligence 2021.