Just catching up with LinkedIn

Here are two more LinkedIn posts based on Coke’s recent interviews. I’m putting them here so the full set (so far) is collected on Substack. I’ll be posting a longer “Part 4” here soon.

August 7, 2026 (my repost of Nick Robertson’s post about his interview with Coke; Nick’s original post is reproduced below):

Would people PLEASE stop interviewing Coke Stewart? She needs a bit more time to reflect on how she is going to answer the questions, in view of the actual record.

Here, Coke says:

“You knew the minute the president won that election in November that there were going to be changes at USPTO. . . . If you wanted to put blinders on and think that you were just going to keep filing those [IPR] petitions and they were going to keep sailing through without any changes in a pro-property rights conservative administration, you were not living in reality.”

Except that’s very different from the message being conveyed within the PTAB while I was there, through February 28. The understanding was that IPRs were not headed for anything like the changes that followed; if anything, there might be a temporary slowdown while the Office addressed the supposed ex parte backlog.

And it certainly isn’t what John Squires told the Senate Judiciary Committee at his May 21 confirmation hearing and in his May 28 QFR responses. As I’ve noted before, Squires promised repeatedly that he would not make major changes to the PTAB without first studying the issues and working with Congress:

https://lnkd.in/eps3yVkA

Coke now seems to be telling us that everyone should have known that the administration’s actual policy would be dramatically different from what its officials were telling employees, Congress, and the public — and that anyone who relied on those assurances was “not living in reality.”

Sorry, Coke. We did not yet know that.

Some of us also hoped that a leader of Coke’s intelligence and experience would understand — and be able to persuade others in the administration — that being “pro-property rights” is entirely compatible with maintaining a sensible balance between the rights of patentees and the rights of the public. Those principles should not be controversial in a patent system whose constitutional purpose is to promote progress.

Also: “settled expectations” is NOT a “logical continuation” of Andrei Iancu’s work. I refuse to believe he would have signed on to such an illogical and unsupportable doctrine.

And here’s the repost (Nick Robertson/Mlex, Aug. 6, 2026):

New in MLex: I sat down with former USPTO Deputy Director Coke Morgan Stewart, who told me that she left the office because she feels she can have a larger impact on patent policy outside of government.

Stewart, who led the agency as acting director last year, said that the office is now moving into “maintinance mode” after a reform-heavy 2025. With the first PTAB rulemaking in review and Director John Squires wanting to focus on AI and patent eligibility policy, it was the right time to leave, she said.

She also defended last year’s many IPR changes, calling them a logical continuation of the work started by former Director Andrei Iancu.

“You knew the minute the president won that election in November that there were going to be changes at USPTO,” Stewart said. “If you wanted to put blinders on and think that you were just going to keep filing those [IPR] petitions and they were going to keep sailing through without any changes in a pro-property rights conservative administration, you were not living in reality.”

“And when people say abrupt change, it wasn’t abrupt for the people who had been waiting for these changes for four years,” she continued. “It was abrupt to the people who liked the status quo, which was basically unfettered access to patent challenges.”

Read more: https://lnkd.in/ezQnV854

August 10, 2026 (my repost of Angela Morris’s post about her interview with Coke; her original post is reproduced below):

Sigh. Another Coke Stewart interview.

“Something that I was able to do is bring more awareness to the challenges that the inventor community is facing. From examination processing to post-grant challenges and repeat challenges and the plight they’re facing in the IP system . . . . In the USPTO, you can affect [sic] a lot of helpful change and bring a lot of awareness to those issues, so I’ll definitely miss that.”

A few points:

1. There is no such thing as a monolithic “inventor community.” The majority of U.S. inventors work for large companies. Inventors at large, established companies are not generally in “plight.”

2. It sounds like she really means the small-inventor community. But anyone who has practiced patent law for any length of time has long been aware of the difficulties faced by small inventors – both before and after the AIA.

3. And inventors are not the same thing as patent owners. If her objective really was to help struggling small inventors, why didn’t she use the USPTO’s asserted discretion in a targeted way? Instead, the principal effect of her “helpful changes” was to strengthen the position of patent owners generally, including well-funded patent assertion entities that bought their patents secondhand – and that have long relied heavily on the plight of small inventors in lobbying for stronger patent rights.

4. Those “helpful changes” also undermine what Congress was trying to accomplish with the AIA. If the Supreme Court does not reverse them, a future Director very likely will.

5. Coming as they did shortly after Director Squires had assured Congress that he would study these issues before making changes, they also blew a hole in the agency’s credibility.

6. And implementing this policy agenda apparently required sidelining – and ultimately pushing out – experienced career leadership at the PTAB and Solicitor’s Office, while the Public Patent Advisory Committee was dissolved and never reconstituted and the PTAB itself was largely dismantled. Those choices did real institutional damage – and they hardly suggest an administration interested in hearing views that might conflict with those of the “inventor community” it had chosen to champion.

7. Coke Stewart and Director Squires have also recently made clear that their direction came from Howard Lutnick, who does not appear to be suffering as an inventor, and whose firm – now run by his sons – benefits enormously from stronger patent-enforcement leverage. Do we really think his concern was the plight of small inventors rather than his family’s economic interests?

8. My biggest complaint remains that these sweeping policies were implemented without any serious attempt to assess their effects on innovation, competition, consumer prices, health-care costs, or the economy. Concern for struggling small inventors is understandable. It is not a license to preserve bad patents at everyone else’s expense.

And here’s the original post (IAM/Angela Morris, Aug. 7, 2026):

Outgoing USPTO deputy director Coke Morgan Stewart is shifting to intellectual property policy after leaving her post, closing out an eventful tenure that saw the agency aggressively tackle a growing patent application backlog while navigating disruptive federal workforce policies.

“Something that I was able to do is bring more awareness to the challenges that the inventor community is facing. From examination processing to post-grant challenges and repeat challenges and the plight they’re facing in the IP system,” Stewart said. “In the USPTO, you can affect a lot of helpful change and bring a lot of awareness to those issues, so I’ll definitely miss that. That ties into what I’m interested in doing: that’s the part that I really want to stay most involved in.”

Stewart sat down with IAM‘s Angela Morris as part of our Women in IP series. More for subscribers here: https://lnkd.in/ecG-cd7t