In Berkeley*IEOR v. W.W. Grainger Inc., Nos. 2024-2353 and 2025-1009 (Fed. Cir. Sep. 21, 2026), Judge Reyna (joined by Judge Dyk and Chief District Judge Bissoon of the W.D. Pa., sitting by designation) issued a nonprecedential opinion. Berkeley*IEOR, doing business as B*IEOR, owns U.S. Patents 7,596,521, 7,882,137, and 8,612,316, which claim methods for calculating object-level profitability. The appeals arise from N.D. Ill. Nos. 1:17-cv-07472 and 0:24-cv-02606 (Judge Kocoras).

The representative claim

The parties and the district court treated claim 1 of the '521 patent as representative for eligibility. That claim recites a process for determining object-level profitability in a computer, including providing a relational database management system, preparing information, establishing rules in the relational database, using the RDBMS to independently calculate at least one marginal value of profit for each object, calculating a fully absorbed profit adjustment value, and combining those values into an object-level profitability measure.

District court path

Berkeley sued Teradata Operations and customer defendants including W.W. Grainger and DHL entities. The district court severed and stayed the direct-infringement counts against the customers under the customer-suit exception, later granted summary judgment that the asserted claims were patent eligible, granted summary judgment of no indirect infringement by Teradata under Count V, and then dismissed the remaining direct-infringement counts. Berkeley appealed those rulings. Teradata cross-appealed the eligibility judgment.

Alice step one

The Federal Circuit agreed with the district court that claim 1 is directed to the abstract idea of calculating profitability. Reading the claim as a whole, the court described it as performing mathematical calculations to determine profitability using a computer. Collecting and analyzing information without more remains abstract, and performing the calculation faster on a computer does not change that conclusion.

Alice step two: inventive concept must be claimed

At step two, the district court had treated parallel processing (or parallel computations) as an inventive concept that improved computer operation. The Federal Circuit held that was legal error. The parties and the district court agreed that claim 1 does not require the RDBMS to perform calculations in parallel; sequential processing could still fall within the claim. When a claim is broad enough to be practiced without the alleged inventive concept, that concept cannot supply "significantly more" than the abstract idea. Features that appear only in the specification, and are not required by the claim, cannot save eligibility at step two.

Berkeley's alternative inventive-concept argument

Berkeley also argued that the RDBMS's ability to independently calculate marginal profit values inside the database itself was a separate inventive concept. The court rejected that framing as the same parallel-processing idea under another label, relying on Berkeley's briefing and expert testimony tying the claimed speed and efficiency gains to parallel rather than sequential calculation.

Disposition

Because claim 1 of the '521 patent recites no inventive concept, it fails at Alice step two. The court reversed the grant of summary judgment of patent eligibility and affirmed the judgment on Counts I-V for Teradata and the customer defendants on the alternative ground of patent ineligibility. It did not reach Berkeley's appeal issues. Each party was ordered to bear its own costs.

What it means

Even on a nonprecedential disposition, the opinion is a clean reminder for section 101 briefing: an alleged technical improvement that is optional under the claim language will not carry Alice step two. Eligibility turns on what the claim requires, not on preferred embodiments that describe faster parallel processing.

What to watch next

Watch whether Berkeley seeks panel rehearing or en banc review, and whether later litigants cite the opinion's step-two requirement that the inventive concept be claim-mandated rather than specification-optional.