Here is a report on recent news and commentary related to the Federal Circuit and its cases. Today’s report highlights:
- an article about how the Federal Circuit’s investigation into Judge Newman’s health “faces an uncertain path . . . since the process is rarely invoked and presents legal questions that haven’t been tested in court”;
- a second article about the standard for inter partes review estoppel;
- a third article about a Delaware court ruling “that a patent covering a way of designing virtual environments reflected ‘a non-abstract technological improvement.’”
Ryan Davis posted an article with Law360 discussing how the “Federal Circuit’s investigation into whether Judge Pauline Newman’s health has left her unfit to serve on the bench faces an uncertain path. . . since the process is rarely invoked and presents legal questions that haven’t been tested in court.”
David McCombs, Eugene Goryunov, and Jonathan Bowser co-authored an article for Reuters about the standard for inter partes review estoppel. McCombs, Goryunov, and Bowser explained how “the Federal Circuit clarified that IPR estoppel extends to any invalidity ground that a petitioner actually raised in an instituted petition and to any invalidity ground that the petitioner did not raise in the petition but reasonably could have.”
Andrew Karpan authored an article about a Delaware court ruling “that a patent covering a way of designing virtual environments reflected ‘a non-abstract technological improvement.’” Karpan reported how this was “a loss for the cloud services company VMware, which had hoped to ax the claims ahead of the start of a second trial in the case next week.” Karpan explained how the current case is “‘VMware’s second attempt arguing before [the Delaware court] . . . that [a claim] of the . . . patent is invalid’” after a 2020 “$236 million verdict against VMware” in the same court.