A couple of weeks after he was selected as C.R. Bard, Inc.’s new trial lawyer in its patent infringement case against W.L. Gore & Associates, Inc., Steven Cherny had a momentary panic attack. It was a perfectly reasonable reaction. In fact, if the Fish & Neave partner had really understood what he was getting into when he took over the Bard case in 2004, he’d have panicked even sooner.
He’d known, of course, that the case had a very long history. For almost three decades, Gore had been fighting for ownership of the artificial blood vessel, known as a vascular graft, that revolutionized vascular surgery. Only after a contentious 12-year proceeding to determine the true inventor of the device and two trips to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit did the Patent and Trademark Office finally reject Gore’s ownership claim in 2002.
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