In 2025 Elong was a petitioner on two challenges to one Feit Electric patent. The petition prompted by Feit’s newly asserted claims was referred and went to trial. The copy filed to join an existing inter partes review was denied, and that denial is now precedential.
Before you read
A co-defendant files a copy of an instituted petition and asks to join it. What does the Director look at first?
Elong set a two-step test: the petition is first reviewed on its own, then as if joinder were granted. It failed both steps.
Part 1 of 7
Elong International USA is named on two petitions against the same Feit Electric patent, U.S. 8,604,678. On June 12, 2025, the Director referred one of them to the Board. Thirteen days later, on June 25, the Director denied the other, and that denial is now precedential.
The filing date of Petition B is not given in the decision, so only its denial is plotted. The court trial in Elong’s case was set for January 20, 2026.
Source
Part 2 of 7
Joinder lets a new petitioner attach itself to an IPR that is already instituted. It matters because of the one-year bar: a defendant has one year from service of an infringement complaint to file an IPR, but that time limit doesn’t apply to a request for joinder. For years, a copy of an instituted petition plus a joinder motion was a common way for a late defendant to get into an existing case.
The tempting reading
File a copy, ask to join, and the deadline and the discretionary factors take care of themselves.
What the 2025 rulings say
The time bar still doesn’t apply to joinder, but discretion does, twice. Elong reviews the copy on its own and then as if joined. Realtek says a time-barred party proceeds “only in exceptional circumstances.”
Source
Part 3 of 7
Savant (GE Lighting) and LEDVANCE filed the first IPR against the ’678 patent on August 26, 2024. On September 20, 2024, Feit asserted additional claims against Savant in court. On December 9, 2024, Savant, Elong and Xiamen Longstar filed a second petition aimed at the newly asserted claims.
The Director referred it. The art and the challenge to claim 1 were “substantially the same” as in the first IPR, but Feit’s later assertion “necessitated the filing of this Petition.”
Absent extraordinary circumstances, the Board was to consolidate it with the first IPR. The Board instituted on June 23, 2025, and ODP lists a final written decision on August 31, 2026. A trade report on a late-August decision in consolidated IPRs on the ’678 patent says every claim asserted against Savant and LEDVANCE was held unpatentable. Whether that decision is the one in this petition, and its outcome, have not been confirmed from the official record.
Part 4 of 7
Elong and Xiamen Longstar also filed IPR2025-00258, which they called identical to the first IPR’s petition, with a motion to join it. The Director set out a two-step test: “discretionary considerations are first reviewed for the Petition on its own, and then reviewed if joinder were to be granted.”
The petition failed both steps, because the court trial came first either way.
A claim-construction (Markman) hearing had been scheduled, and a stay was not shown to be likely.
Source
The petitioners offered not to assert invalidity in court based on the same prior art if joined. That didn’t change the result. The Director also named a structural concern: if the original petitioner settled, the Office “would have to maintain a proceeding that it would not have instituted” for the joining parties. Denied.
Part 5 of 7
Realtek v. ParkerVision, decided the same day and also precedential, takes up a party past its deadline. ParkerVision served its complaint on September 28, 2023, so Realtek’s one-year deadline passed on September 28, 2024. Realtek filed a copycat petition and joinder motion on December 24, 2024.
Source
The Director held that “Petitions filed by time-barred parties should proceed only in exceptional circumstances,” found none, and denied.
Part 6 of 7
Choose your side.
Part 7 of 7
A second petition is not automatically suspect. Code200 v. Bright Data, precedential since 2022, vacated a denial where the earlier petitions had never been evaluated on the merits. Older precedential decisions had already applied the follow-on-petition factors to joined and related parties, so Elong and Realtek extend an existing line rather than start one.
They decide
They don’t decide
The takeaway
Joining someone else’s IPR is no longer a dependable fallback. File your own, on time, for your own reasons.
Each item is marked in the story with a dashed outline. We update the story when the official record confirms or corrects it.
Precedential decisions bind the Board within their designated scope. Informative decisions show the Office’s reasoning but do not bind the Board. Court opinions are cited for what they decided; later history was checked on the date shown above.