A Blog About Intellectual Property Litigation and the District of Delaware


GMS
The Honorable Gregory M. Sleet

Watcha got there? New ADR provision?
Watcha got there? New ADR provision? Zdeněk Macháček, Unsplash

It's always a good idea to keep up to speed on the judges' form scheduling orders. In their form orders, the judges set forth their preferences, and when those orders are entered in a case, they can override some of the local rules.

In the past, when the judges have updated their form scheduling orders, they have occasionally ordered that the updates to apply to pending cases. Sometimes, even absent such an order, counsel have been eager to apply the new procedures on their own.

(The last such change I recall was when judges started switching over to Judge Andrews' method of claim construction briefing, where the parties serve back-and-forth …

Grapes
Amos Bar-Zeev, Unsplash

If you're not an IP attorney in Delaware, you probably don't remember Grape v. Jingle. It was a 1-page order where Judge Sleet, in four words in a footnote, held that claim construction in all future patent disputes would be limited to 10 terms per patent:

The parties have submitted for construction [19] terms from U.S. Patent No. 7,023,969. Although disinclined to do so in the past, the court - regrettably - will impose a limit of 10 disputed terms per patent for claim construction in this and all future patent actions.

This brief order set Judge Sleet's standard practice for the next nine years until his retirement in 2018.

It quickly circulated around the …