The Federal Circuit’s orders from last week told us about case captions and why you should only cite what you need.
Boesen v. Garmin Int’l, Inc., No. 2010-1488 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 1, 2011) (Judge Prost) (nonprecedential order)
This order gives us some insight into one way the Federal Circuit handles substitution of parties. Here, the original plaintiff, Martha Trout, assigned her patent to a new owner, Peter V. Boesen, after the case was appealed to the Federal Circuit. Mr. Boesen—not Ms. Trout—submitted briefs on the merits to the Federal Circuit, and the defendant, Garmin, explained to the court that Mr. Boesen acquired the patent in early 2011. In this circumstance, the Federal Circuit opted to revise the case caption to reflect Boesen’s interest.
Read the original order here.
ClearValue, Inc. v. Pearl River Polymers, Inc., No. 2011-1078, -1100 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 1, 2011) (Judge Prost) (nonprecedential order)
This order concerns Pearl River’s motion for costs for preparing the joint appendix. ClearValue improperly cited massive amounts of testimony and documents, resulting in more than 1300 pages of unnecessary material added to the joint appendix. For instance, ClearValue cited an entire transcript, nearly 800 pages long, but only three questions and answers in the transcript should have been included, according to Pearl River.
Interestingly, Clear Value recognized that it was wrong and agreed to reimburse Pearl River’s costs, but the Federal Circuit decided that “mere payment of the excess costs will not cure the indiscriminate or inappropriate references in the briefs” (page 2). On top of paying the cash, the court also required Clear Value to file corrected briefs and to prepare a corrected joint appendix that cited only the relevant pages.
Read the original order here.