Patent Law Practice Center

Reexamination Requests Filed the Week of July 12th

Here is the latest  installment of Reexamination Requests from Scott M. Daniels, of Reeaxamination Alert and Practice Center Contributor…

Notable is a request filed by Medtronic against a patent belonging to Edwards Lifesciences AG for a valve prosthesis.  Also interesting is a request filed by Nalco regarding a Baker Hughes patent – the patent is the subject of an infringement action between the companies that has already featured a preliminary injunction and two trips to the CAFC.

Reexamination requests are typically reported in the Official Gazette approximately three months after filing. Such a delay in reporting requests, particularly for requests that involve copending District Court litigation, is too long. We therefore report new ex parte and inter partes reexamination requests filed electronically the previous week as they appear on the Patent Office PAIR system.  Information on concurrent litigation is also provided, where available.

Some reexamination requests are still filed by paper.  Because of the time required for the Patent Office to review such paper requests before posting on PAIR, our report may come three weeks after filing.  The information available from the Patent Office may be incomplete in a few cases because not all the reexamination request papers have yet been posted on PAIR.  There may also be gaps in the Patent Office docket numbers listed because, for any of various reasons, a reexamination request has been assigned a docket number but is not ready for posting. (more…)