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DoD Renews Its Request to Limit CFC Bid Protest Jurisdiction Dramatically

Client Alert | 1 min read | 04.22.16

In its legislative proposal package sent to Congress on April 12, 2016, the DoD is again seeking to curtail the CFC’s bid protest jurisdiction significantly by importing nearly all of GAO’s rigid timeliness rules into the Tucker Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1491(b), with the stated goals of “reducing the time to decide bid protests by avoiding unnecessarily repetitive protests” and eliminating an “unintended forum shopping practice that has arisen under the existing bid protest system[.]” For a detailed review of the similar DoD legislative proposal in 2012, see this post, where we explain why the proposed change, among other things, (1) will not fully address DoD’s “second bite at the apple” concerns, (2) will deny many prospective protesters a “first bite,” and (3) may have a significant effect on the types and numbers of protests filed in the GAO and the CFC.

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Client Alert | 3 min read | 11.20.25

Design Patent Application Drawings & Prosecution History Must Be Clear (Merely Translucent Won’t Suffice!)

Design patents offer protection for the ornamental appearance of a product, focusing on aspects like its shape and surface decoration, as opposed to the functional aspects protected by utility patents. The scope of a design patent is defined by the drawings and any descriptive language within the patent itself. Recent decisions by the Federal Circuit emphasize the need for clarity in the prosecution history of a design patent in order to preserve desired scope to preserve intentional narrowing (and to avoid unintentional sacrifice of desired claim scope)....