Unified Message from the Trial Court: Get to the Point Quicker (and Cheaper)

separator

Unified Message from the Trial Court: Get to the Point Quicker (and Cheaper)


In the long dance of patent litigation, plaintiffs often try to assert as many claims of as many patents as they can in order to increase the workload (and headaches) for the defendants. By the same token, the defendants often try to respond in kind by identifying as many conceivable potential invalidating prior art references as they can find (after scouring the world to find them). The result is a back–and–forth process that costs the parties money and the Court time struggling with patent claims or prior art references that will very likely never see the light of trial. As the roster of patent cases continues to grow within the handful of district courts that manage the vast majority of patent lawsuits, judges are looking for ways to force the parties to get to the nub of their dispute earlier, to put down the shotgun and pick up the rifle. In this vein, Judge Davis of the Eastern District of Texas issued the following order recently rejecting both parties proposals for streamlining the case, and limiting the plaintiff to a maximum of 20 asserted claims and the defendants to no more than four distinct bases of invalidity per asserted claim, and ordering the parties to meet and confer in good faith to see if they couldn’t drive the numbers down further. The price of failure in that endeavor was a filing with the Court explaining “why a particular claim or prior art reference must remain in the case.” A gentle reminder that courts with limited time will have limited patience with extraneous claims or arguments.

Unified Messaging (ED Tex July 12, 2012)


View this document on Scribd

Posted by David Swetnam-Burland

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
separator

No comments so far!

separator

Leave a Comment