SAN FRANCISCO — The Patent Trial and Appeal Board is still “new” by legal industry standards, but busy. The three-year-old forum for inter partes review proceedings, or so-called AIA trials, includes more than 250 administrative patent judges who put out orders on a daily basis.

But it's not so new that lawyers preparing for a PTAB appearance need to fumble around in the dark. The PTAB Handbook, a practitioners' guide to the board's intricacies, will appear in print by the end of December from Bloomberg BNA.

By establishing the PTAB, the 2012 America Invents Act created a new subspecialty between litigation and traditional patent prosecution overnight. Because inter partes reviews are litigated like trials but require the admission and technical background of a patent bar-admitted attorney, they have sent patent prosecutors scrambling to brush up their trial skills and litigators looking to partner up with patent prosecutors.The guide's editor-in-chief, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman partner William Atkins, is both.