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SUSPEND Act Gets Moving

Client Alert | less than 1 min read | 11.13.13

On October 29, the House Oversight Committee passed out of committee the Stop Unworthy Spending, or SUSPEND, Act, legislation that would, effective FY2017, consolidate agency suspension and debarment offices into a single "Board of Suspension and Debarment" at GSA and unify the procurement and non-procurement suspension and debarment regulations, among other changes. The SUSPEND Act contains exceptions to allow offices of major agencies to remain in place in certain specified circumstances and for the SBA to retain its authority to suspend or debar entities for misrepresentation of small business status.


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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....