1. Home
  2. |Insights
  3. |State Slammed For Adopting GAO Recommendation

State Slammed For Adopting GAO Recommendation

Client Alert | less than 1 min read | 08.22.07

In Grunley Walsh Int'l v. U.S. (Fed. Cl. Aug. 3, 2007), in which Crowell & Moring represented the successful plaintiff, the Court of Federal Claims held that the Department of State acted arbitrarily when it adopted a GAO recommendation to reverse its own, longstanding interpretation of the total business volume requirement in the Diplomatic Construction Program statute (22 U.S.C. § 4852). The government argued that the court must defer to State's revised interpretation, but the Court refused to do so, because that would "effectively strip this court of any real review in any case where the agency followed a recommendation of the GAO on an interpretation of a statute or regulation."

Contacts

Insights

Client Alert | 3 min read | 11.20.25

Design Patent Application Drawings & Prosecution History Must Be Clear (Merely Translucent Won’t Suffice!)

Design patents offer protection for the ornamental appearance of a product, focusing on aspects like its shape and surface decoration, as opposed to the functional aspects protected by utility patents. The scope of a design patent is defined by the drawings and any descriptive language within the patent itself. Recent decisions by the Federal Circuit emphasize the need for clarity in the prosecution history of a design patent in order to preserve desired scope to preserve intentional narrowing (and to avoid unintentional sacrifice of desired claim scope)....