Posts Tagged: "stays"

In this Part IV, we will discuss the proposal that all interested parties by plaintiffs, the enhanced pleading requirements, limitations on discover and customer stays. While some of these provisions may seem to make sense on their surface, and tailored to provide greater transparency, the reality is that the provisions are extraordinarily burdensome. For example, as written one proposal would require a corporation bringing a patent infringement lawsuit to disclose every stockholder no matter how few shares are owned. Furthermore, by micromanaging patent litigation discretion will be taken away from district court judges while at the same time onerous obligations are placed on small businesses before they can even begin to assert patent infringement, which is problematic because so many entities already knowingly choose to infringe rather than negotiate licenses or engineer around patent rights.

There are several varieties of a stay. With post grant proceedings we’re talking mostly about discretionary stay. Every district court has inherent right to do this. Judges are generally favorable to granting stays with more being granted than not. “All a judge has to do is get burned once by not granting a stay, going to trial to the end, and then having claims invalidated by the Board and then having to have an appeal,” says John J. Marshall, law professor at Villanova University School of Law, previously Of Counsel at Drinker Biddle. The initial stay before a petition is granted is short. Then after the petition is granted, the district court judges are more likely to grant a stay, because IPR will simplify issues that might be important to the district court judge. That quick timeline is one of the factors that helps you get a stay for concurrent litigation and getting ammunition for use in district court claim construction. In fact, you may find that these factors are so persuasive that if a defendant in district court case files a petition for IPR, and you, as another defendant, can’t join because you are past the one month joinder cutoff, you still may be asked to stay your case until other defendant’s IPR concludes. As of October 2013, contested stay motions pending IPR petitions have a 68.5 percent grant rate and those pending CBM petitions have an 83 percent grant rate, according to a Finnegan infographic based on the published PTO AIA statistics. Those are really good rates. It’s something to consider even in districts like Delaware or East Texas.