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Now Streaming On YouTube: The Federal Circuit

Reported by Andrew Karpan at Law360

The Federal Circuit will join other courts in the country and begin livestreaming the audio feed of oral arguments on YouTube. The Federal Circuit hopes to livestream all oral arguments on YouTube by April, but will start with five panels in March to work out any issues. The remaining arguments in March will still be available to the public through the existing system that was put in place at the beginning of the pandemic. Practitioners in the field praised the move that follows in the footsteps of the Supreme Court as well as district courts such as the Western District of Texas, which has provided a live audio feed for the patent trial taking place over the past week, VLSI v. Intel.

“There’s been a lot of benefits, overall, to taking advantage of technology to make courtrooms more accessible to the public and to lawyers and to their clients,” Mike Tomasulo, an intellectual property lawyer and a partner at Winston & Strawn LLP, told Law360 on Thursday, noting that high-stakes patent lawsuits have been attracting an avid live audience.

Make It Pithy and Other Lawyer Tips From a Federal Circuit Judge

Reported by Perry Cooper at Bloomberg Law

On Friday, Federal Circuit Judge Raymond Chen joined a fireside chat at the 17th Annual Symposium on Emerging Intellectual Property Issues focused on the ten years since the passage of the America Invents Act. Perry Cooper summarized the event hosted by the Tsai Center for Law, Science, and Innovation at SMU Dedman School of Law. Judge Chen noted the usefulness of analogies in arguments which have helped judges remember the case and potentially convinced judges to agree with their argument. With respect to appeals of PTAB decisions, Judge Chen highlighted the importance of the standard of review that grants significant deference to the PTAB. Judge Chen also reflected on his early years as a judge on the Federal Circuit.

“For the first couple of years here I did not feel comfortable because I was still relatively young and I literally grew up in this career appearing in front of these judges,” he said. “I had always looked to these judges like they were the golden gods of patent law.”

In the eight years following his arrival to the Federal Circuit, Judge Chen has grown more comfortable with disagreeing with his fellow judges.