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Punctilious Performance Required For Recovery

Client Alert | less than 1 min read | 03.04.05

Ignoring that the government's own failure to have drawings ready so that performance could begin made the contractor's failure to have a required certificate of insurance immaterial, the Federal Circuit in Singleton Contracting Corp. v. Harvey (Jan. 26, 2005) found concurrent cause for delay and denied delay damages to the contractor. The lesson for contractors is to meet all of your contract requirements that you reasonably can, even when the circumstances may seem to make them superfluous.

Insights

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....