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DoD's Guerilla War on IR&D

Client Alert | 1 min read | 02.10.16

In a notice published in the Federal Register on February 8 that will almost certainly be unpopular with contractors and their customers, DoD asked for comments on its consideration of adding a requirement to the DFARS that would "require offerors to describe in detail the nature and value of prospective IR&D projects on which the offeror would rely to perform the resultant contract." As described in the notice, that information would be used by DoD to "evaluate proposals in a manner that would take into account that reliance by adjusting the total evaluated price to the Government, for evaluation purposes only, to include the value of related future IR&D projects," presumably by increasing the evaluated price of that offeror's proposal to include the full value of the IR&D project.

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Client Alert | 2 min read | 11.14.25

Defining Claim Terms by Implication: Lexicography Lessons from Aortic Innovations LLC v. Edwards Lifesciences Corporation

Claim construction is a key stage of most patent litigations, where the court must decide the meaning of any disputed terms in the patent claims.  Generally, claim terms are given their plain and ordinary meaning except under two circumstances: (1) when the patentee acts as its own lexicographer and sets out a definition for the term; and (2) when the patentee disavows the full scope of the term either in the specification or during prosecution.  Thorner v. Sony Comput. Ent. Am. LLC, 669 F.3d 1362, 1365 (Fed. Cir. 2012).  The Federal Circuit’s recent decision in Aortic Innovations LLC v. Edwards Lifesciences Corp. highlights that patentees can act as their own lexicographers through consistent, interchangeable usage of terms across the specification, effectively defining terms by implication....