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 – February 8, 2024: Crowell & Moring secured a resounding victory for ScentAir Technologies, LLC on Friday, January 26th in ScentAir’s long-running patent infringement battle against competitor Prolitec, when a Delaware federal jury found ScentAir did not infringe Prolitec’s asserted patents. This win marks another milestone in ScentAir's history of successfully defending its innovative technologies and intellectual property from Prolitec’s misguided assertions of patent infringement.

Washington, D.C. – May 24, 2023: Crowell & Moring secured another win on behalf of ScentAir Technologies, LLC in its long-running patent infringement dispute with competitor Prolitec Inc. On Monday, Prolitec was forced to withdraw the assertion of one of its patents because there was no merit to its infringement theory. This is the latest in a long string of wins against Prolitec by ScentAir, a global leader in scent marketing for many of the world’s most recognized retail and hospitality brands.

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.

The PTAB ruled last week that the common law doctrine of claim preclusion only applies at the PTAB in one direction, holding that Congress did not intend for an adverse district court judgment to block a party from pursuing a subsequent inter partes review challenge.