When the Daily Report named Thad Kodish to its 2013 “On the Rise” list, a colleague of his at Fish & Richardson noted that many of his clients preferred to have lawyers with 25 years of experience serve as expert witnesses, but Kodish was ahead of the curve.

Last year, Kodish went ahead of the curve again when he won a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit for his client, Dalton-based carpetmaker Shaw Industries, against Automated Creel Systems.

The decision answered the thorny question of whether patent challengers would have only a single shot to invalidate a patent—and the answer was no. Leading a team that also included Erin Alper and John Dragseth, Kodish established this fundamental point of law, now often referenced as the Shaw doctrine. The court followed Fish's reasoning that, if the Patent Board declines to take on certain grounds of invalidity that a party presents, then the party could not have raised or reasonably could have raised them under Section 315(e), so that those grounds should be available to the petitioner in later litigation.