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Privacy for Everyone! New FAR Rule Imposes Mandatory Training Requirements for Employees Handling PII

Client Alert | less than 1 min read | 12.28.16

After years of consideration, DoD, GSA, and NASA have published a final rule requiring contractor employees who handle personally identifiable information (PII) or work with a system of records to complete initial and annual privacy training that addresses specified elements, including the Privacy Act, working with PII, and the contractor’s incident response plan. The final rule – effective January 19, 2017, and applicable to all contracts including those for commercial items and those below the Simplified Acquisition Threshold – also requires contractors to identify each covered employee, maintain records indicating that its employees have completed the requisite training, and to provide these records to contracting officers upon request.

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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....