Supreme Court to Decide Standard of Review for Patent Claim Interpretation Rule

The Supreme Court on Monday granted a petition for review of the Federal Circuit's en banc decision upholding its practice of applying de novo review of patent claim construction decisions. Rule 52 states that "findings of fact ... must not be set aside unless clearly erroneous.” The petitioner stated the question on appeal as:

Whether a district court’s factual finding in support of its construction of a patent claim term may be reviewed de novo, as the Federal Circuit requires (and as the panel explicitly did in this case), or only for clear error, as Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 52(a) requires.

I'll go out on a thick limb and predict that the Supreme Court will unanimously reverse the Federal Circuit and require some degree of deference to findings of fact in District Court decisions while still allowing de novo review of the legal conclusion. The only question is how the Court will attempt to draw a line between factual and legal conclusions in claim construction.

Claim Term Glossaries

Anyone involved with patent prosecution or enforcement knows that the most critical aspect of patent litigation is claim construction. In plain English, claim construction means deciding precisely what the words in the claims mean. Thus, defining claim terms is critical to patent litigators and must be given careful consideration by patent draftsmen. The Public Patent Foundation published three patent claim term glossaries by Dr. David Garrod, the Foundation's Senior Litigation Counsel, free of charge. They may be viewed or download (in Adobe .pdf format) here.