An expert witness whose testimony is relied upon by a Petitioner or Patent Owner in an Inter Partes Review, Covered Business Method Review or Post-Grant Review in the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.

We collect PTAB expert witness data from the PTAB using a novel, semi-automated process supplemented by human editors.

1. We scrape exhibit lists from various documents, primarily petitions and responses, to identify declarations filed in the proceeding.
   • We examine the text of each declaration to determine whether it is an expert declaration originally filed in this case. Attorneys, fact witnesses, and other types of non-expert declarations are filtered out using a combination of two techniques:
   • A rules-based technique looks for hints in the text, such as “I have been retained by [party] as a technical expert”
2. A machine learning technique broadly examines all features of the document, such as the declarant’s writing style and paragraph organization, to determine whether the given document is an expert declaration.
3. A portion of the declarations are set aside for manual review by our team for various reasons, including rules conflicts and low prediction confidence scores.
4. An automatic text labeling technique is used to detect the names of experts in these cases. All expert names are reviewed by the Docket Navigator team (for example, to verify that “Anne Smith” and “Annette B. Smith” are the same person).

Our internal tests found that about 97% of expert witnesses are accurately associated with PTAB proceedings using this method. Because the first digit of a PTAB filing’s docket number indicates the filer’s role, we expect expert-party associations to be highly accurate.