USPTO Updates PTAB Trial Practice Guide: Mandatory Pre-Hearing Conference 15 Days Before IPR/PGR Oral Hearings Turns Issue Management into a New Strategic Window
On December 12, 2025, the USPTO updated the PTAB Trial Practice Guide to provide that, for AIA trial cases instituted under the process implemented on October 17, 2025, the Board will hold a pre-hearing conference with the parties no later than fifteen days before the oral hearing. For parties in inter partes review (IPR) and post-grant review (PGR), this means that disputes often treated as matters for final-stage oral emphasis—claim construction, the rationale for combining prior art, and objective indicia of nonobviousness—are now formally pulled forward into an earlier and more structured procedural checkpoint.
This is more than a scheduling refinement. The PTAB has also indicated that the conference is designed not only to signal which issues the panel would like addressed at the hearing, but also to give the parties a chance to identify issues they want raised at the hearing, and to discuss certain pending motions, limited evidentiary admissibility issues, and unresolved demonstrative disputes. For companies and counsel, the practical shift is significant: oral advocacy is no longer just a last hearing-day performance. It is increasingly a two-step contest made up of pre-hearing issue management and formal oral presentation, with the quality of preparation for the first stage shaping the effectiveness of the second.
1. The update changes not whether there will be a hearing, but who gets to shape the hearing agenda first
In many PTAB cases, hearing preparation has always mattered, yet teams often concentrated their real strategic effort on the oral hearing itself: who leads, how long each theme should occupy the podium, what demonstratives should carry the record, and how to respond to the other side’s late-stage framing. The update changes that dynamic by placing both sides into a structured pre-hearing conversation with the panel fifteen days before argument. Once the panel identifies the issues it wants to hear about, the centre of gravity shifts. Control over what becomes the practical hearing agenda no longer rests mainly in counsel’s live presentation on the day of argument; it begins to take shape earlier, under the panel’s guidance.
That matters because advocacy now becomes less about speaking time alone and more about issue sequencing. The oral hearing remains the core venue for persuasion and judicial engagement, but the questions the panel chooses to foreground often determine which parts of the record truly matter. A party that has relied on the hearing to rehabilitate weaknesses in the papers through broader narrative advocacy may find less room to do so. By contrast, a party that can distil a large record into a small set of decision-driving questions before the hearing may gain a real strategic advantage.
It is especially telling that the USPTO’s own examples are not minor procedural details. Claim construction, reason to combine, and objective indicia are often central merits issues in AIA trials. That signals that the pre-hearing conference is not intended as a courtesy call or a purely administrative checkpoint. It is a formalised mechanism for issue compression, and issue compression often decides what the panel will treat as outcome-determinative.
2. The fifteen-day window is not only about argument order; it is also about evidence and presentation control
Read closely, the new conference serves at least three functions. First, the panel can indicate which legal and factual disputes it wants the parties to focus on during the oral hearing, helping both sides use limited argument time more efficiently. Second, the parties may identify issues they would like addressed at the hearing, but without turning the conference itself into a full merits argument. That means counsel must be able to explain, succinctly and strategically, why a point deserves the panel’s attention without lapsing into over-argument. Third, and perhaps most practically, the parties may discuss pending motions, seek an early ruling on the admissibility of a limited number of challenged exhibits, and address unresolved problems with demonstratives.
That third function is easy to underestimate, yet it may produce the greatest practical consequences. In PTAB matters, oral hearings are often described as a chance to synthesise an already closed paper record. But the persuasive force of that synthesis depends heavily on what evidence can be emphasised, what exhibits remain usable, and how demonstratives frame the dispute. If the scope of an expert opinion, commercial-success showing, technical comparison, or demonstrative theme is narrowed before the hearing, the shape of the oral narrative changes with it. The fifteen-day conference is therefore not just about what can be said, but about what can be said effectively and on what procedural footing.
For in-house teams, that means motions to exclude, demonstrative disputes, and oral-hearing preparation should no longer be treated as separate workstreams. They now form a connected pre-hearing issue-management chain. The written record defines the available terrain, the conference helps sort what will matter most, and the hearing becomes the final act of presentation. Weakness in one stage will diminish the value of the next.
3. The practical impact on companies and counsel: preparation has to move earlier, and the oral team has to engage sooner
The clearest consequence for outside counsel is that work previously concentrated in the final stretch before the hearing now needs to be advanced to before the pre-hearing conference itself. Counsel can no longer wait until demonstratives are nearly final to ask the most important questions: What do we want the panel to carry into the hearing room as the real decision points? Which issues are worth oral time, and which should be de-emphasised? Which evidentiary disputes need to be positioned for early resolution because they directly affect hearing-day persuasion? That requires closer and earlier coordination among the lawyers handling briefing, experts, motions practice, and hearing advocacy, rather than a late-stage assembly of separate work products.
For companies, internal decision-making must also move forward. If the case turns in part on secondary considerations such as commercial success, industry praise, copying, or long-felt need, the business team should identify earlier which factual themes are worth elevating in the hearing phase and which internal materials may strengthen the narrative around expert testimony. If the core battle lies in claim construction or the rationale for combining references, then the business and legal teams should work with counsel to develop a short-form merits narrative well before the hearing. The goal is not to repeat every technical detail in the record, but to crystallise the few disagreements that the panel is most likely to treat as decisive.
More broadly, the update may alter how hearing excellence is judged. In future PTAB practice, the strongest oral teams may not be those with the most polished live delivery alone. They may be the teams that are able to compress issues, evaluate evidentiary boundaries, and lock in presentation logic before the conference ever occurs. The advantage shifts from performance at the podium to design before the podium.
4. What parties should do next: treat the pre-hearing conference as an independent battlefield, not a procedural footnote
For companies already in, or likely to enter, IPR or PGR proceedings, the first step is to update the internal case calendar. The two weeks before oral hearing should no longer be viewed merely as a time to polish slides. They should be treated as the countdown to a separate procedural contest in which claim construction themes, prior-art combination logic, objective indicia, motions to exclude, and demonstrative strategy all need clear prioritisation. The second step is to prepare a distinct conference objective list: what you want the panel to focus on at hearing, what noise you want reduced beforehand, and what issues you do not want the other side to elevate into the centre of the oral argument. The third step is to train for conference-style advocacy—concise, judge-oriented framing that communicates complex technical and evidentiary points in digestible form, rather than recycling the language of briefs.
At the same time, parties should keep the scope of the update in view. According to the USPTO’s notice, the mandatory conference applies to relevant AIA oral hearings in cases instituted under the process implemented on October 17, 2025; parties in other cases may still request a pre-hearing conference by emailing
In practical terms, the USPTO has not merely inserted one more meeting before a PTAB hearing. It has concentrated several previously scattered tasks—issue definition, evidentiary boundary-setting, and judicial attention management—into a new institutionalised window. For well-prepared parties, that window can become a powerful chance to shape what the panel treats as central, reduce hearing noise, and improve the efficiency of oral persuasion. For teams that prepare too late, it may close off room for recovery before the hearing even begins.
