ABSTRACT
Patent litigation is complex, expensive, and difficult to manage. Optimistically, neither litigant wants the trouble or expense of a lengthy and complicated multi-patent trial, and neither does the court. In a Sisyphean effort to tame an unmanageable caseload, the judge must decide how to narrow the issues to best serve the administrability interests of the parties, the court, and the jurors. But do these court mandated methods employed when narrowing claims in multi-patent litigation coincide with the constitutional safeguard against arbitrary denial of liberty and property guaranteed by procedural due process?
This Note addresses the due process concerns with claim narrowing strategies employed in multi-patent and multi-claim infringement suits through the lens of the Federal Circuit’s In re Katz decision. A number of district court’s applications of the In re Katz decision are analyzed against potential procedural due process issues, including one extreme approach – the ‘Showdown Procedure’ – from the Northern District of California. Ultimately, this Note provides a clear enumeration of a burden-shifting framework that a patentee should take to preserve the right to reassert abandoned or winnowed claims in a future trial, which creates benefits such as uniformity in patent-narrowing procedures, decreasing forum-shopping, and lessening the burden of patent-saturated districts.
Gretkowski, Derek, Claim-Limitation Estoppel – A Framework to Narrowing Claims in Multi-Patent Litigation (September 27, 2021). Rutgers Law Review, volume 73, no 3, 2021.
First posted 2021-09-30 11:45:23
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