The Federal Circuit on June 5, 2026 declined to disturb six inter partes reviews even though the district court had found that the real party in interest behind those reviews violated the stipulation that helped get them instituted. In Hafeman v. Google LLC, No. 2024-1600 (precedential), a panel of Judges Dyk, Hughes, and Stoll dismissed-in-part and affirmed-in-part Carolyn Hafeman's consolidated appeal from three final written decisions arising out of six IPRs filed by Google and Microsoft. The Board had concluded that all challenged claims of U.S. Patent Nos. 10,325,122; 10,789,393; and 9,892,287 were unpatentable. Judge Hughes wrote for the court.

The appeal turned on the interaction between a procedural promise and the statute that walls off institution decisions from review. Hafeman sued LG Electronics in the Western District of Texas in July 2021, accusing LG phones, tablets, and laptops sold with Google or Microsoft "Find My Device" features. In July 2022, Google and Microsoft filed six IPR petitions, two against each patent, naming LG as a real party in interest. Hafeman opposed institution, pointing to the parallel district court litigation, the imminence of trial, and the absence of any agreement to minimize duplication. LG then served a so-called Sotera stipulation, representing that if the IPRs were instituted, it would not pursue in district court "any ground that [Google or Microsoft] raised or reasonably could have raised" in the IPRs. Relying in part on that stipulation and the then-Director's guidance on discretionary denials, the Board instituted all six reviews in January 2023.

What followed is the wrinkle that produced the appeal. According to the opinion, the district court later found that LG violated the stipulation, and Hafeman asked the Board to vacate institution and terminate the IPRs, or at minimum to address in its final written decisions whether the violation warranted dismissal. The Board did not revisit those arguments in its January 23, 2024 decisions. On appeal, Hafeman framed her challenge as one directed not at institution but at "how the IPR proceeded after institution" and at the sufficiency of the final written decisions under the Administrative Procedure Act. The court found that framing did not change the analysis.

"The problem with Ms. Hafeman's challenge is that it seeks to terminate the IPRs for reasons related to the institution decision because the Sotera stipulation was a consideration for institution. This makes clear that her challenge 'has institution as its direct, immediate, express subject' and is thus beyond our review."— Hafeman v. Google LLC, No. 2024-1600 (Fed. Cir. June 5, 2026), opinion

The § 314(d) holding

By statute, the decision whether to institute inter partes review is "final and nonappealable." 35 U.S.C. § 314(d). The court explained that this bar reaches both direct challenges to institution and matters "closely tied to the application and interpretation of statutes related to" that decision, citing the Supreme Court's Cuozzo framework, and that a party does not bypass the bar by relabeling its challenge as an attack on some other agency action. Drawing on Thryv v. Click-To-Call, the panel noted that even a challenge "labeled as an appeal from the final written decision" remains barred where it amounts to a contention that the agency should not have instituted. The opinion applied the court's own recent decisions in Federal Express v. Qualcomm and Ethanol Boosting Systems v. Ford to the same effect, observing that "§ 314(d) applies when a party attempts to dislodge institution."

The court distinguished the cases Hafeman relied on. In Uniloc 2017 v. Facebook and Facebook v. Windy City Innovations, the panel said, the reviewable issues were a "no estoppel" determination and a joinder decision under § 315(c) — determinations separate from, and later than, institution. Here, by contrast, the relief Hafeman sought was to vacate the final written decisions and remand with instructions to dismiss the IPRs, a remedy the court found tied directly to the institution decision because the stipulation had been a consideration for institution. On that record, the panel held the termination argument barred and dismissed that portion of the appeal. The opinion records that the Board, when Hafeman first raised the stipulation issue, had stated that any violation "was an issue for the district court to resolve."

Claim construction and secondary considerations

The court reached the merits of the remaining arguments and affirmed. On claim construction, Hafeman argued the Board implicitly misconstrued the "without assistance by a user" limitation when it found the Jenne reference taught remote updates despite requiring a user to establish an internet connection. The panel assumed without deciding that the Board construed the term and found no error, reasoning that "without assistance by a user" modifies the action of "initiating or changing return information" and "does not limit the unrecited action of establishing an internet connection in the first instance." The court read the specification's description of a "unique communication power" — analogized in the patent to "McAfee anti-virus software Internet updating capability" — as contemplating that a user might initiate the connection, and found the prosecution history, which distinguished a prior-art interrupt-key step, did not compel the broader reading.

On secondary considerations of nonobviousness, the court affirmed the Board's finding that Hafeman failed to establish a nexus between her commercial embodiment, the Retriever, and the claimed invention. The panel applied the substantial-evidence standard and the nexus framework from Volvo Penta v. Brunswick, noting the nexus analysis compares the specific product to the patent's claims rather than its specification. It found the Board adequately explained its conclusion that praise was directed in part to unpatented features, that commercial-success evidence was not connected to the merits of the invention, and that arguments about copying by Google's and Microsoft's Find My Device programs had not been properly raised below.

Procedural posture and what the court decided

This was a direct appeal from three consolidated final written decisions of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, with the Acting Director of the USPTO intervening in support of the § 314(d) bar. The court exercised jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1295(a)(4)(A). The disposition was "dismissed-in-part, affirmed-in-part": dismissed as to the Sotera-stipulation termination argument for lack of reviewability under § 314(d), and affirmed as to the claim-construction and secondary-considerations rulings. Costs were assessed against the appellant. The decision is precedential and addresses the reviewability of a post-institution refusal to terminate where the predicate for the argument — a stipulation — was a consideration the Board weighed at institution. Independent legal coverage of the decision is collected in the sources below.