Thryv, Inc. v. Click-To-Call Technologies, LP
The Supreme Court ruled that a patent owner cannot ask federal courts to review whether the Patent Office correctly applied a one-year filing deadline before starting an administrative patent challenge, because a statute makes the agency's decision to begin such reviews final and unreviewable.
The decision means that even if the Patent Office wrongly allows a late challenge to proceed and ultimately cancels patent claims, the patent owner cannot get that decision undone by arguing the review never should have started.
How it got here: The Patent Trial and Appeal Board started review and canceled patent claims; the Federal Circuit initially dismissed the appeal, then reversed en banc and vacated the Board's decision; the Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve the reviewability question.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Click-to-Call Technologies owned a patent for anonymous telephone call technology. A predecessor company of Thryv, Inc. had been sued for infringing that patent back in 2001. More than a decade later, Thryv petitioned the Patent Office to conduct an inter partes review of the patent — a formal process for reconsidering whether a patent was validly granted. A federal law bars such petitions filed more than one year after a related infringement suit. Click-to-Call argued Thryv's petition was years too late; the Patent Office disagreed and canceled most of Click-to-Call's patent claims.
The question before the Court
When a federal patent agency starts a review of a patent despite a challenger's petition being filed too late, can a patent owner go to court to challenge that timing decision?
The Court's answer
No — the Court ruled that courts cannot review the Patent Office's decision about whether the one-year filing deadline in §315(b) applied to Thryv's petition. A separate provision, §314(d), makes the agency's decision to start an inter partes review "final and nonappealable," and the Court found this bar covers challenges based on the timing rule as well, because that rule directly governs whether review may be started at all — it expressly states that inter partes review "may not be instituted" when a petition is filed too late.
The Court also reasoned that allowing timeliness appeals would waste the resources already spent evaluating patent validity and leave invalid patents enforceable — the opposite of what Congress intended when it created this streamlined review process. Even if the Patent Office misapplied the timing rule, patent owners remain free to appeal the final decision on the underlying merits of patent validity; what they cannot do is go to court solely to argue the review should never have started.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Patent owners facing inter partes review proceedings lose a key avenue for challenging the process: they cannot go to court to argue the petition came in too late. Even when the government itself concedes the timing rule was violated, the patent claims stay canceled. Companies and inventors must instead focus all challenges on the merits of the patent's validity, not on whether the review should have been allowed to begin.
What changes now
The Federal Circuit's decision vacating the Patent Office's ruling is itself vacated, and the appeals court is directed to dismiss Click-to-Call's appeal for lack of jurisdiction. The Patent Office's original decision — canceling 13 of Click-to-Call's patent claims as lacking novelty or nonobviousness — stands. Click-to-Call has no further avenue to challenge the proceeding on timing grounds; its patent claims remain invalidated.
What this does not decide
The Court expressly declined to decide whether mandamus — a special emergency court order — might still be available in an extreme case where the agency's decision was particularly egregious. The Court also left unresolved the separate question of whether a lawsuit voluntarily dismissed without prejudice actually triggers §315(b)'s one-year filing deadline.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence in part — Justice Thomas
Justices Thomas and Alito joined the majority opinion in full except for Part III-C, the section addressing the AIA's purpose and design as additional support for the Court's holding. They wrote no separate opinion explaining their reasons for declining to join that portion.
Dissent — Justice Gorsuch
Justice Gorsuch argued that §314(d) only bars review of the agency's determination under §314(a) — whether a petition has a reasonable likelihood of success — not of its application of §315(b)'s separate timing rule. He read 'under this section' in §314(d) as limiting the no-appeal rule to determinations found within §314 itself. He also contended that the Court's earlier SAS Institute decision had definitively confined the bar to §314(a) challenges, and that the 'closely related' language from Cuozzo was dicta since repudiated. In a broader critique, he argued the decision dangerously expands unreviewable agency power over patent rights that inventors should be able to defend in court.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The America Invents Act of 2011 created inter partes review, letting third parties challenge the validity of already-granted patents before the Patent Office. Section 314(d) of the Act makes the agency's 'determination whether to institute an inter partes review' — that is, its decision to start the process — 'final and nonappealable,' displacing the usual presumption that courts may review agency actions.
- The Court's earlier decision in Cuozzo Speed Technologies, LLC v. Lee (2016) had interpreted §314(d) to bar review of at least questions 'closely tied to the application and interpretation of statutes related to' the decision to start review. Cuozzo applied that bar to a challenge under §312(a)(3), a provision separate from §314 itself, establishing that §314(d) reaches beyond its own subsections.
- The Court asked whether §315(b)'s one-year time limit is 'closely tied' to the institution decision — and found it plainly qualifies. Section 315(b) expressly states that inter partes review 'may not be instituted' when a petition is filed too late. It governs institution and nothing else, making a timeliness challenge indistinguishable from a direct challenge to the decision to start review.
- The AIA's structure and purpose reinforced this conclusion. Congress created inter partes review to efficiently weed out bad patents. Allowing timeliness appeals would undo full merits decisions the agency had already completed, rescuing invalid patent claims — the exact outcome Congress sought to avoid. When a patent owner can only win on timing (not on the merits), granting that appeal serves no legitimate patent-quality goal.
- The Court rejected the argument that §314(d) only shields the agency's initial assessment under §314(a) of whether a petition has a reasonable likelihood of success. Because Cuozzo had already extended the bar to §312(a)(3) — another provision outside §314(a) — that reading was foreclosed. The broader text of §314(d) covers the full decision 'whether to institute,' not just the §314(a) likelihood-of-success analysis.
- The Court distinguished its earlier decision in SAS Institute Inc. v. Iancu (2018), which had allowed judicial review of how an inter partes review proceeds once it is underway. That case involved a question about the scope of the proceeding after institution; here, Click-to-Call was challenging the threshold decision to start review at all — a challenge §314(d) squarely bars.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Cuozzo Speed Technologies, LLC v. Lee (579 U. S. ___)
The Court explicitly reaffirmed Cuozzo's holding that §314(d) bars appeals closely tied to the institution decision, not just §314(a) challenges.
Distinguishes SAS Institute Inc. v. Iancu (584 U. S. ___)
SAS Institute allowed review of how a proceeding runs after it starts; here the challenge is to whether it should have started, so SAS Institute does not apply.