When Coke Morgan Stewart became acting director of the USPTO, much of the patent world knew relatively little about her. Yet she quickly became the focus of considerable praise and criticism for the agency’s decisions, often without much understanding of her background or how those decisions actually came about. In this episode of Clause 8, Stewart, now President and CEO of the Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP), sits down with Eli Mazour to finally tell her own story, from the career path that took her from English literature and a near detour into architecture school to the acting director’s chair, and to explain the how and why behind decisions she made along the way.
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Stewart’s father was federal Judge Henry Coke Morgan Jr., who presided over one of the largest patent judgments in history, $2.75 billion in Centripetal v. Cisco. The Federal Circuit later vacated the judgment because his wife owned less than $5,000 in the defendant’s stock. Stewart recalls her initial reaction as “incredible frustration with my mother,” who, despite being in her 80s, was still actively trading stocks. She also offers her perspective on the court’s decision, whether vacating the judgment was the appropriate remedy, and what the case illustrates about the unpredictability of patent litigation.
Stewart had spent a decade as a career lawyer in USPTO’s Solicitor Office, then served as a deputy attorney general in Virginia, her first political appointment. But she had no obvious path to leading the USPTO. At the 2024 Republican convention in Milwaukee, former USPTO Director Andrei Iancu told her that pursuing the director role was “like a campaign”: you have to put your name out there. Her reaction was that “this is never going to happen.” She describes having no idea how to surface her name, working her contacts just to get an interview, and treating that interview as the win. What followed was a nearly hour-long conversation with Howard Lutnick, a separate round with presidential personnel, and a video call, while she was on a cruise ship, in which Lutnick told her he wanted her to be deputy director so that she could start running the office on day one of the administration. A week later, she was in New York for transition planning, buying a few days of winter clothes at Nordstrom on the way to the hotel and eventually flying back to Washington with Lutnick on his plane.
Stewart arrived at the USPTO with a legal pad full of policy ideas, but her first months were dominated by the backlog and workforce challenges: a hiring freeze that meant rescinding outstanding offers, daily directives from OPM, DOGE-era demands and the “fork in the road” resignation offer, which more than 300 examiners took. She pushes back on the perception that PTAB judges were laid off, emphasizing that not a single judge was involuntarily separated. She also credits Lutnick with winning an exception to the hiring freeze that authorized the USPTO to hire 1,200 patent and trademark examiners. And she describes how the return-to-office push played out, from talk of tables in hallways at the Department of Commerce to protecting telework arrangements for a geographically dispersed workforce.
On policy, she walks through the logic behind taking the discretionary part of IPR institution decisions back to the front office, including her argument that the burden should not fall entirely on the patent owner and that “settled expectations” and repeat challenges belong in the analysis. Asked to handicap the USPTO’s proposed PTAB rules, she says it is “60, 40” that they happen, explaining why the rulemaking process has moved largely beyond the Patent Office’s control. On Director John Squires returning merits-based institution decisions to PTAB panels, she lays out the pros and cons. She suggests a middle ground is possible but also points to a cautionary history: when the front office previously screened for discretion and left the merits to the panels, the institution rate for petitions reaching the merits stage rose to 95%.
Stewart also reflects on what she would do differently. She says she wishes she had spent more time communicating with the workforce and had created a workforce council to give employees some representation and a better feedback loop. She also describes how valuable her regular meetings with an examiners’ union representative were, despite her generally conservative perspective on government unions. The conversation also covers AI and copyright, the patent legislation she would like to see enacted, her new role at C4IP, and how she expects AI to reshape patent examination.
Chapters:
00:00:00 Introduction: who is Coke Morgan Stewart?
00:01:15 Her background: from English literature to law
00:07:13 Joining the USPTO Solicitor’s Office
00:13:10 Her father’s patent cases and the Cisco stock controversy
00:22:29 Moving into the front office
00:27:00 Becoming acting director: “like a campaign”
00:37:30 The call from a cruise ship
00:40:47 Day one: backlog, hiring freeze and DOGE-era turmoil
00:47:34 Telework, unions and the examiner workforce
00:51:35 Settled expectations and repeat challenges
01:08:13 The proposed PTAB rules and the push for legislation
01:17:28 Squires and institution decisions returning to PTAB panels
01:22:36 AI and copyright
01:26:55 Her new role at the Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP)
01:33:32 What she’d do differently: a workforce council
01:37:38 Advice for the next generation and AI in examination
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