Here is a report on recent news and commentary related to the Federal Circuit and its cases. Today’s report covers a discussion of the Supreme Court’s dismissal of a petition by Imperium IP Holdings, a recent petition for certiorari by Veterans Contracting Group, and a comment on the Supreme Court’s recent rejection of several patent petitions.
IPWatchdog discussed the Supreme Court’s dismissal of a petition by Imperium IP Holdings in Imperium IP Holdings, Ltd. v. Samsung Electronics Co. The petition asked “[w]hether an appellate court may reverse a jury verdict based on its own view that expert testimony was credible, ‘unrebutted,’ and ‘uncontradicted.'” Twelve senior executives, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists had filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to grant the petition over concerns that the Federal Circuit ruling “usurps the Constitutionally-mandated role of juries to find the facts and decide issues of witness credibility.”
At Law 360, Sarah Martinson reported on a recent petition for certiorari by Veterans Contracting Group in Veterans Contracting Group, Inc. v. United States. The petition said that the Federal Circuit “had correctly found in April that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs unlawfully removed the small business from a database but wrongly concluded that a VA employee had reasonably canceled VCG’s solicitation bid in the system as a result.” The question presented in the petition is “[w]hether agency action based on an earlier, unlawful act by the agency is shielded from judicial correction based on an individual employee’s alleged lack of knowledge that the agency’s earlier action was illegal.”
Ian Lopez of Bloomberg Law commented that “[t]he U.S. Supreme Court’s recent rejection of several patent petitions underscores that the justices tend to accept cases that have a broader impact than the issues that regularly arise in patent litigation.” Lopez highlighted one attorney’s opinion that “[p]etitioners that bring patent cases to the justices must understand that it’s ‘essential here to speak the court’s language rather than speaking patent-speak'” and that “[h]aving a Supreme Court specialist could be a ‘significant benefit for a petition.'”