Insights

Washington – August 15, 2024: The 2025 edition of The Best Lawyers in America® has recognized 42 Crowell & Moring lawyers as "Best Lawyers" and 29 lawyers as “Ones to Watch.”

Washington – August 17, 2023: The 2024 edition of The Best Lawyers in America® has recognized 47 firm lawyers as "Best Lawyers" and 41 lawyers as “Ones to Watch.”

Washington – August 19, 2021: The 2022 edition of The Best Lawyers in America® has recognized 53 firm lawyers as "Best Lawyers" and 13 lawyers as “Ones to Watch.” The publication also named partner William H. Frankel the Best Lawyers 2022 Copyright Law "Lawyer of the Year" in Chicago.

As part of the 2012 America Invents Act, statutory estoppel was included to balance the interests of patent owners and patent challengers following an inter partes review (“IPR”).  Estoppel prevents an IPR petitioner from later asserting in court that a claim “is invalid on any ground that the petitioner raised or reasonably could have raised” during the IPR.  35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2).  As applied, estoppel prevents petitioners from later relying in district court or in ITC proceedings on most patents or printed publications – the limited bases upon which petitioner can rely in an IPR.  But a question remained, and contradictory district court decisions arose, as to whether petitioners would be estopped from relying on a prior art commercial product (known as “device art,” which could not itself have been raised in the IPR) even if a printed publication describing the product (i.e. a patent or technical manual) was available and presumably could have been raised. 

In its first en banc decision in six years, the Federal Circuit in LKQ Corp. v. GM Global Technology Operations LLC, No. 2021-2348 (Fed. Cir. May 21, 2024) overruled the prevailing obviousness test for design patents; abandoning the decades-old standard known as the Rosen-Durling test, and embracing a less rigid approach to assessing obviousness for design patents.  As explained below, the decision creates uncertainty as to how the obviousness of design patents should be assessed in the future.  

In March 2023, the USPTO and its Council for Inclusive Innovation announced the First-Time Filer Expedited Examination Pilot Program.  This new program benefits those individuals or small businesses that are first-time filers for patent rights and qualify as “micro entities.”  Through the program, these micro entities receive an expedited first Office action, which the USPTO hopes will lower time-based barriers for inventors that acted as barriers to commercialization or may have otherwise precluded inventors’ use of the patent system. 

Attorneys John Fuson, Hilary Johnson, Robbie Jost, and Andrew McElligott will present a webinar for the Orange County Bar Association Health Care Law Section titled, "3D Printing at the Point of Care: Compliance and Liability Concerns" on Thursday, November 10, 2022. This session will provide (1) a primer on how the FDA regulates medical devices, (2) an outline of how FDA plans to regulate 3D printing of devices at the point of care and legal issues raised by this new model as compared to traditional manufacturing, (3) an examination of the state of product liability litigation when it comes to 3D printed devices and the potential product liability risks when healthcare facilities take on the role of traditional manufacturers, and (4) an analysis of different intellectual property scenarios healthcare facilities must be aware of when 3D printing POC devices.