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SCOTUS: Kagan Is the One, NBC News Reports | National Law Journal

May 10, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Harvard law school dean Elena Kagan
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NBC News confirmed Sunday night and is reporting that President Barack Obama plans to nominate Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

Obama is expected to announce his choice at the White House with Kagan at his side Monday morning, with the goal of Senate confirmation hearings before the end of June.

Obama appears to be aiming for a relatively easy confirmation process by picking the 50-year-old Kagan, who won support from Republicans like Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah and John Kyl of Arizona in the 61-31 vote to confirm her for her current post 14 months ago. But with the higher stakes involved in a Supreme Court nomination, and party animosities intensifying as the 2010 elections approach, Kagan is unlikely to win as many votes this time around. (For a National Law Journal interview with Kagan last year, go to this link.)

Kagan, a former Harvard Law School dean who also taught at the University of Chicago, served in the Clinton White House and as a special counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, and in 1999 was nominated to a judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Her nomination never received a hearing or a vote. At the beginning of her career after graduating from Harvard Law School, Kagan clerked for appeals Judge Abner Mikva and Justice Thurgood Marshall, then worked as an associate at Williams & Connolly in Washington.

With a relatively short paper trail on controversial legal issues, Kagan has won praise and criticism from both the right and the left. Other candidates like Judge Diane Wood of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals might have had a harder time winning confirmation because of their documented stances on issues such as abortion.

If confirmed, Kagan will be the first new justice without prior judicial experience since Lewis Powell Jr. and William Rehnquist joined the Court in 1972. By joining Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor on the Court, her ascendancy would mark the first time in the Court’s history that three women serve on the Court simultaneously.

via Law.com – Kagan Is the One, NBC News Reports.

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Federal Circuit Ruling May Rein In Patent Re-Examinations | Law.com

April 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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A federal appeals court ruling may curb the growing trend of using re-examinations to challenge other parties’ patents.

In In Re Suitco Surface Inc., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit remanded a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejection of some claims in a patent re-examination. The PTO’s interpretation of Suitco’s patent claim for “material for finishing the top surface of the floor” was “unreasonably broad,” wrote Circuit Judge Randall Rader.

Rader noted that case law requiring the PTO to give claims “their broadest reasonable construction” does not give the PTO “an unfettered license to interpret claims to embrace anything remotely related to the claimed invention,” Rader wrote. “Rather, claims should always be read in light of the specification and teachings in the underlying patent.”

Suitco will be a frequently cited case for patent lawyers helping clients fight re-examinations, said Steven Moore, an intellectual property litigation partner in the Stamford, Conn., office of New York’s Kelley Drye & Warren, who was not involved in the case.

“It’s a fight that we all have with the patent office,” Moore said. “If it’s in your specification and you’ve used it in a particular manner, that’s what should rule, not this broadest-interpretation concept.”

Seeking a re-examination of the patent is “almost a knee jerk reaction” for defendants in patent infringement cases, he added.

“With the number of re-exams being allowed by the patent office, if you’re in litigation you almost always have a re-exam,” Moore said.

via Law.com – Federal Circuit Ruling May Rein In Patent Re-Examinations.

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Two Decades and Counting for Iran Case

February 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Lawsuits — particularly the big-dollar, complex corporate variety — often get compared to marathons. In the case of McKesson Corp.’s legal struggle with the government of Iran, however, that comparison doesn’t quite cut it.

On Jan. 22, the dispute, a fight over shares in an Iranian dairy, reached its 28th anniversary. It has wended its way through one international arbitration, two federal trials and five trips to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Now, it could soon be heading for its sixth.

A decade ago, a federal judge awarded McKesson $20 million for claims that Iran expropriated the company’s interest in the dairy and withheld its dividends. But during the past seven years, the case has hit a series of unexpected bumps, from changes in government policy to new rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court. The longer it’s gone on, the trickier its path has seemingly become.

San Francisco-based McKesson, a medical products distributor that ranked 15th on last year’;s Fortune 500, is represented in the case by a team from Morgan, Lewis & Bockius headed by partner Mark Bravin. The company and Bravin declined to comment. Iran’s lawyers from Washington, D.C.’s Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe, including partner Thomas Corcoran Jr. and associate Laina Lopez, also declined to comment.

via Law.com – Two Decades and Counting for Iran Case.

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Court Tells Microsoft to Edit Word | BusinessWeek

December 22, 2009 By 1 Comment

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), the world's biggest software maker, must alter its popular Word software or stop selling the product after it lost its appeal of a $200 million patent-infringement verdict won by a Canadian company.

The company, based in Redmond, Washington, was given until Jan. 11 — five months from the original order issued in August — to make the change by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington. Word is part of Microsoft’s Office software, used by more than 500 million people.

The court today upheld a verdict which has since grown to $290 million won by closely held I4i LP of Toronto. The dispute is over a patented invention related to customizing extensible markup language, or XML, a way of encoding data to exchange information among programs. Microsoft has called it an “obscure functionality.”

via Court Tells Microsoft to Edit Word – BusinessWeek.

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