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SBA Proposes To Relax Employee-Based Size Standard

Client Alert | less than 1 min read | 08.03.07

On July 27, 2007, the U.S. Small Business Administration issued a proposed rule to simplify and relax the way in which it determines whether an entity complies with an employee-based size standard. Instead of the current method, which uses a rolling average of the number of employees over the previous 12 months, the proposed method is based on the average number of employees over the last three completed calendar years and will not only require less frequent updates to an entity's size status but also allow a greater number of contractors that have experienced growth in the past several years to still qualify as small.

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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....