One year ago I was in a maximum security prison. I was on duty, as a member of the trial bar of the Northern District of Illinois, appointed by the Court to represent a prisoner. I visited my client in a downstate prison, and I took a deposition of correctional officers inside the forbidding walls […]
The Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has announced that in her zeal to prevent substandard patents from issuing, she will insist on clarity of the record. Every word of every patent will have to be defined. And every word stated in the patent process—in the give and take (or “prosecution”) between applicant
Patent jury trials reached their zenith in the mid-1990s. The stakes remain high, though the drama has faded. Now, even if it’s called a trial, what you get is “some kind of hearing,” as Judge Henry Friendly once called it in his seminal lecture and law review article. Some kind of hearing: That’s all you can expect in […]
