Posts Tagged: "Alice Step 2"

Everyone agrees that the 2014 Alice v. CLS Bank decision dramatically changed courts’ approach to patent eligibility analyses under Section 101. Six years later, the Federal Circuit has issued enough opinions on the issue to allow for quantitative analysis to aid patent practitioners before that venue. We gathered our data set by reviewing every Federal Circuit decision addressing Section 101 since the Supreme Court’s Alice ruling. We tracked the judges’ individual Step 1 and Step 2 votes in each case and the ultimate panel decisions. We also recorded the opinions’ authors and the authors of any dissents, and which decisions were per curiam. Numerous cases involved independent analyses of different groups of claims. In those circumstances, we coded the votes on each claim or group separately. As a result, some cases ended up with multiple votes by a single judge being recorded on both Step 1 and Step 2.