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Pre-Award Protest Timeliness Rule Extended

Client Alert | less than 1 min read | 12.18.12

In Comint Sys. Corp. v. U.S. (Dec. 7, 2012), the Federal Circuit extended its judicially imposed timeliness rules to require a protest of a solicitation defect to be filed in court prior to award, if practical, even if the alleged error occurred after proposals had been submitted. The court noted that this is consistent with the GAO timeliness rules.


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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....