Monday 4 April 2011

Claim construction thesaurus

I've not yet had a chance to see it, but the Thesaurus of Claim Construction, by Robert L. Kahrl and Stuart B. Soffer, looks as though it might be of substantial interest to patent litigators both in the United States and quite possibly beyond it.  The first-named author is a practice leader in Jones Day's IP practice and a seasoned litigator; the second-named author runs an IP consultancy and has academic credentials too.  According to their publisher, Oxford University Press,
"Claim construction is a major phase of a patent litigation where the meaning and scope of the claims themselves - the invention - is determined by the court. The outcome of this definition phase is crucial to the respective infringement and invalidity positions of the parties. The Thesaurus of Claim Construction directs practitioners to cases -- and in contrast to searches on more general electronic databases, only those cases -- in which claim terms have previously been construed, and further to the sources of the evidence used by previous courts to construe the terms in dispute".
PatLit hopes to get a review copy in due course.

Bibliographic details: ISBN13: 9780199737116, ISBN10: 0199737118. Paperback, 1,040 pages. Price: $295. Web page here.

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