Time: 1:00 to 2:30 pm EST
The Sedona Conference Webinar on
Highmark and Octane Fitness:
The Supreme Court’s New Standards for Attorney Fee-Shifting in Patent Cases
A panel of distinguished members of bench and bar will discuss the implications of and best practices for applying the U.S. Supreme Court’s new standards for attorney fee-shifting. As a result of the Highmark and Octane Fitness rulings last month, the discretionary authority of the district courts with respect to the awarding of attorneys’ fees to prevailing parties has been dramatically increased, with the Supreme Court lowering the bar for what constitutes an “exceptional case” under the patent statute, and holding that an award of attorney fees by the district courts should no longer be reviewed de novo on appeal, but rather should be given due deference. The attractiveness to patent litigants “on both sides of the v.” of filing for such awards under 35 U.S.C. § 285 will no doubt increase. Will the law of unintended consequences rear its ugly head and yield the very type of needless satellite litigation that has been the impetus behind recent calls for patent reform in the first place? Or, will the bench and bar be able to stem the tide and get ahead of the curve?
Topics to be covered in the webinar include:
Legislative proposals to curb so-called “abusive” patent litigation by increasing the availability of attorney fee-shifting
Likely impact of the Supreme Court’s new standards for attorney fee-shifting awards on patent litigation
Best practices for practitioners for the appropriate and effective use of and response to motions for attorney fee awards
Best practices for the courts to award attorney fee-shifting, under the new standards, to curb abusive patent litigation, without allowing the use of such motions to itself become abusive
Potential implications of the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the term “exceptional case” beyond the patent litigation context to other statutes that incorporate the same term, such as the Lanham Act