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White House Will Screen Appointees Seeking Outside Employment

Client Alert | less than 1 min read | 01.20.04

The White House recently instructed all federal agencies that the Counsel to the President must now screen all requests by Senate-confirmed Presidential appointees seeking approval to leave the government for employment in the private sector. The White House said that the new rule is required to balance senior appointees' financial interests with the integrity of the appointees' service to the President, which agency ethics officials are not always able to do because they lack an “administration-wide perspective.”

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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....