Call 855-808-4530 or email [email protected] to receive your discount on a new subscription.
Managing the life cycle of a transaction, whether an offering, a financing or a merger, requires an attorney to seek information from disparate sources within the firm. These searches are often inefficient, time-consuming and may not always yield the required data. The firm can use knowledge management (KM) techniques to build a one-stop repository of transaction data to help attorneys manage a transaction from pitch to press release.
Features
Client relationship management (CRM) applications succeed within the law firm environment when they address both the organization's strategic needs, as well as the user's individual needs. These systems also relieve lawyers from the manual drudgery of managing and calculating their billable hours. Both the organization and individual lawyers obtain obvious value from these systems. Win-win. <br>But with so many CRM products in the marketplace with varying capabilities, there seems to be a growing disconnect between the strategic value that firms enjoy from these solutions, and the benefits derived by individual lawyers. The challenge therefore becomes one of focus.
Knowledge management (KM) has about as many definitions as it does implementations, and in law firms it was recognized early on as a tool to help lawyers in supporting their clients. Lots of paper, information, and knowledge to manage ' and robust document management systems emerged as KM solutions. That's fine for the lawyers, but in marketing and business development, it's who you know as much as it is what you know. At Duane Morris, where our Marketing and Business Development Department is only 3 years old, we were able to grow this functional area around the key information and processes needed to be successful.
Patentees and competitors must take proactive steps to handle design-around issues related to intellectual property matters. Using a design-around strategy, a competitor can produce an equivalent product that is legally non-infringing on a patentee's issued patent. Successful design-around strategies can present time and cost savings in terms of research and development costs, legal fees and potential litigation costs and also can minimize the delay in commercializing an equivalent product. For example, by designing around, a competitor has the incentive to potentially capture a significant market share by producing an equivalent product while undercutting the patentee's profits.
In today's age of strong patent rights, enhanced visibility and budgetary clout are the norm for intellectual property professionals — and are generally regarded as good things. With the creation of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ("CAFC") in 1982, we have seen a number of distinct pro-patent trends. These have included a robust presumption of patent validity, higher damage awards for acts of infringement, more flexible approval standards introduced by the PTO, and an increasingly granted right on the part of patent holders to seek injunctive relief to stop the production of infringing products. Prior to the creation of the unitary CAFC, patent rights were less certain to be enforced through either the award of high monetary damages or sweeping injunctive relief.
Features
The patent applicant can act pre-emptively, even pending further development of legal doctrines specific to infringement of business and network-related methods, to draft and prosecute claims that will "catch" infringing activity at as many conceivable loci along the network as possible, and thwart competitors' ability to readily avoid infringement by parsing method steps creatively.
Features
Highlights of the latest intellectual property news from around the country.
Features
Attorneys have rushed to the border in 2004 to enforce patent rights. In the first 6 months of 2004, the International Trade Commission ("ITC" or "Commission") has received more complaints to uphold patent rights than in any previous year except for 2001. It is anticipated that by the end of the year, the ITC will have experienced its most active year for patent litigation ever. Two key factors are helping to fuel an expansion of patent litigation at the ITC: the ability to pursue parallel actions before both the ITC and Federal District Court, and the fast track investigation of the ITC with final decisions typically issuing within 12 to 18 months. Moreover, the in rem nature of the remedies available at the ITC, particularly the general exclusion order, allows domestic patent holders to obtain substantial prospective relief without filing a series of actions against numerous foreign infringers. Consequently, as technology increasingly becomes a global enterprise, the pace of patent infringement complaints filed with the ITC will only continue to surge.
In 2002, Duke University attempted to avoid liability for patent infringement by invoking the common law experimental research exception to patent infringement. In a landmark decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected Duke University's argument that its infringing research activities should be exempt from liability under this exception. <i>Madey v. Duke Univ.,</i> 307 F.3d 1351 (Fed. Cir. 2002).
Features
It has long been held that a good faith reliance on timely and competent advice of counsel can negate a charge of willful patent infringement. Such advice of counsel can be used to potentially shield an infringer from having to pay enhanced damages of up to three times the damages under 35 U.S.C. §284 and/or the patentee's attorneys' fees under 35 U.S.C. §285. Similarly, a defendant's failure to obtain advice of counsel until after the company commenced its infringing activities would be evidence of willful infringement. <i>Underwater Devices Incorporated v. Morrison-Knudsen Company,</i> 717 F.2d 1380, 1390 (Fed. Cir. 1983). The practical application of this rule has been fraught with difficulty, however, since assertion of an opinion of counsel as a defense to a charge of willfulness typically involves a waiver of attorney-client privilege as to communications surrounding the opinion. The tension created by this dynamic was exacerbated by an adverse inference that an opinion of counsel was unfavorable if an accused infringer refused to waive privilege and disclose an opinion of counsel in defense of a willfulness charge. <i>Kloster Speedsteel AB v. Crucible, Inc.,</i> 793 F.2d 1565, 1580 (Fed. Cir. 1986). The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in <i>Knorr-Bremse Systeme Fuer Nutzfahrzeuge GMBH v. Dana Corp.,</i> 2004 U.S. App. LEXIS 19185 (Fed. Cir. 2004) (<i>en banc</i>) abolished the adverse inference rule, but also reaffirmed that one is under a duty of care to avoid infringement.
