Insights

San Francisco – March 19, 2026: Crowell & Moring achieved a decisive victory for Kawasaki Heavy Industries in the Northern District of California, obtaining a $48 million jury verdict after a two-week trial. The jury unanimously found that Rorze Corporation and its U.S. subsidiary, Rorze Automation, Inc., willfully infringed Kawasaki’s U.S. Patent No. RE45,772.

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.”

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.

The Federal Circuit’s recent decision in Luv n’ Care v. Laurain provides a cautionary tale for patentees. Disclosing prior art to the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) is not enough to insulate against a finding of inequitable conduct, particularly where a patentee mischaracterizes that prior art and the PTO’s patentability determination may have differed had the patentee accurately described the prior art. Misconduct by the patentee during litigation can also lead to a finding of unclean hands that bars the patentee from relief for alleged infringement against the opposing party in that litigation.

Drug development in the United States is expensive and time-consuming, which makes pharmaceutical patents an important asset for pharmaceutical companies to protect their investment in bringing new drugs to market.  Equally important to the public and other drug companies is that any pharmaceutical patents that are issued by the Patent Office cover only technology that is new and not obvious. Clinical trials frequently lie at the intersection of these two competing interests. Pharmaceutical companies must engage in clinical trials to test their new products and the existence of those clinical trials may become public. But can the announcement of a trial itself render the resulting invention obvious and unpatentable?