Supreme Court Smacks Down CAFC Again: Says Courts Have More Free Rein In Awarding Attorneys Fees (original) (raw)

from the this-text-is-patently-clear dept

Yet again (in what has become quite the trend), the Supreme Court has struck down a ruling by the appeals court for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) — the court that is somewhat infamous for almost always favoring patent maximalism. In a related pair of cases, the Supreme Court has now rejected the CAFC’s rather strict rules for awarding attorneys fees in bogus patent litigation. The Supreme Court, once again, seems positively mystified by the CAFC’s interpretation of patent law, and the fact that CAFC’s rules (which all but eliminated attorney fees) seemed to have no basis in the law at all.

As Justice Sotomayor’s ruling (representing a basically unanimous court — Justice Scalia didn’t want to be a part of some random footnotes) notes, the CAFC’s rules are way too “rigid” and go beyond what the law says (and what Congress intended).

The framework established by the Federal Circuit in Brooks Furniture is unduly rigid, and it impermissibly encumbers the statutory grant of discretion to district courts.

Our analysis begins and ends with the text of §285: “The court in exceptional cases may award reasonable attorney fees to the prevailing party.” **This text is patently clear.**It imposes one and only one constraint on district courts’ discretion to award attorney’s fees in patent litigation: The power is reserved for “exceptional” cases.

The problem, of course, is that CAFC redefined “exceptional” to mean something extreme — when there was “material inappropriate” behavior — which goes well beyond what “exceptional” means.

The Federal Circuit’s formulation is overly rigid. Under the standard crafted in Brooks Furniture , a case is “exceptional” only if a district court either finds litigation-related misconduct of an independently sanctionable magnitude or determines that the litigation was both “brought in subjective bad faith” and “objectively baseless.” 393 F. 3d, at 1381. This formulation superimposes an inflexible framework onto statutory text that is inherently flexible

Fee shifting is part of what’s being fought over in the current attempts at patent reform. While it’s good to see the Court make it slightly easier to get attorneys’ fees, it would be much better if Congress went even further in making it abundantly clear that bogus patent suits will lead to awards of attorneys fees.

Filed Under: attorney's fees, cafc, patents, supreme court