LJN Newsletters

The restitution defense to insurance coverage proceeds from a simple and logical premise. If I steal money from you and am forced to return it, there is no loss for my insurer to reimburse because I never had a right to the money in the first place. Life is rarely so simple, however, and insurers have asserted the restitution defense — with varying degrees of success — in a broad range of situations, some having little connection to the original premise.

Federal courts are increasingly allowing litigants to serve foreign defendants via e-mail under certain circumstances.

In Takeda v. Mylan, the Federal Circuit revisited attorney fees in the context of an ANDA application. In doing so, the court provided additional guidance regarding factual circumstances that may support such awards and addressed several of the unanswered questions from the Yamanouchi v. Danbury opinion.

Urged by the Supreme Court's opinion in KSR, the Federal Circuit has addressed its precedent regarding the obvious-to-try standard, positively stating a standard implied in its previous holdings.

Recent decisions have begun to fill in the gaps left by In re Seagate Technology, LLC. They suggest that a competent opinion is still an effective defense to a willfulness charge, and that a jury may consider a defendant's failure to obtain an opinion when determining the defendant's intent for purposes of willfulness and inducement. Also, legitimate trial defenses may be sufficient to establish that a defendant's actions at the time of infringement were not "objectively reckless.

This article provides an overview of how various courts have dealt with the question of post-verdict compensation in the wake of the eBay Inc. v. MercExchange L.L.C. verdict.

A patent can be held invalid for incorrect inventorship, and co-inventorship of one, even relatively insignificant, claim can entitle a co-inventor to an ownership stake in every claim of the patent. Moreover, failure to join all co-inventors/owners as plaintiffs can prevent the real party in interest from enforcing a patent. A recent decision by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Nartron Corp. v. Schukra U.S.A., Inc., is illustrative of such risks

In re Kubin, 2009 WL 877646 (Fed. Cir. April 3, 2009), now appears to be the first case in which a defined biochemical structure was found to be obvious despite the fact that the structure was previously unknown and unpredictable.