Post-grant proceedings can be an effective stay strategy. What they provide is a district court some certainty as to the timing of the patent office’s decision on patentability, and that’s very attractive to district courts. You have to remember that in the past, the traditional reexamination proceedings could go on for years and years, and as a result, district court judges that stayed cases in light of those proceedings did not have a firm fix on when they would get an answer back from the patent office.

The beauty of the America Invents Act is that it puts a statutory timer on these proceedings. They will typically last about one year after institution of the proceeding till a final decision is made. And they may run overall roughly one and a half years because the patent office will have six months to make a decision whether to institute or not.