Will courts stay pending litigation?

It is not yet clear how amenable courts will be to stay pending litigation while a defendant pursues IPR proceedings. The few decisions to date tend to grant such stays, though the treatment is far from uniform and in several cases the parties agreed to the stay.

Even so, in many district courts where time to trial is approaching three years, a defendant has no assurance it will not be estopped from challenging validity at trial if it files an IPR ( Inter - Parte ) review.