It’s a key alternative to district courts---the plan offloads thousands of cases to district courts.

The decrease in granted petitions may also be tied to the type of patents now being challenged, in particular, the overall strength of those patents. The early IPR petitions appeared to focus on the weakest patents, a point that Judge Smith noted during a 2014 meeting of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Public Advisory Committee. Indeed the stated goal of the AIA was to give the Patent Office a "toolbox" of new proceedings to "weed out low quality patents… includ[ing] post-grant review, IPR, supplemental examination, and derivation proceedings, as well as a transitional post-grant review program for certain business methods patents." 14 Although the success rate of patent challengers has remained high--at least at trial--challengers have been emboldened to utilize the process, resulting in an increased number of IPR petitions and, according to many practitioners, a higher caliber of patents being challenged. 15 For instance, patent office statistics show that the number of filed IPR petitions more than doubled between 2013 and 2014 and has remained relatively steady since then, evidencing that patent challengers have embraced the PTAB's IPR procedures as a desired alternative to district court litigation. The PTAB has become the largest venue for patent disputes, with 461 petitions filed in the first quarter of 2016, compared with 288 filings in the same period for its nearest competitor, the Eastern  [*17]  District of Texas. 16