The Biggest Patent Decisions of 2024

Director J.C. Rozendaal was quoted in Law360 regarding this year’s notable patent decisions from the Federal Circuit and several recent cases that may shape the future of patent litigation, including Allergan v. MSN Laboratories and LKQ Corp. v. GM. The August 2024 decision in Allergan helped alleviate some concerns among patent owners and attorneys when the Federal Circuit clarified that the first-filed, first-issued patent in a family cannot be invalidated on that ground based on later patents. Rozendaal commented that branded drugmakers “breathed a great sigh of relief when the Allergan case came out because it provided a pathway for them to manage their portfolios in a way that would reduce the risk of this kind of invalidity attack.”

Earlier this year, the full Federal Circuit also took on its first patent case since 2018. In the May 2024 ruling in LKQ Corp. v. GM, the court discarded what it considered “improperly rigid” tests for proving a design patent is obvious. The en banc court explained that the rules for design patents lacked the flexibility the U.S. Supreme Court required in 2007 for obviousness analysis. While the case drew attention, Rozendaal noted that the “practical impact may be less significant.” He said, “[d]esign patents are maybe going to be marginally harder to get and harder to keep, but I think a lot of the analysis is going to be the same.”