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GAO Bid Protest Statistics for FY2019

Client Alert | less than 1 min read | 11.08.19

On November 5, 2019, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (“GAO”) released its Annual Report on Bid Protests for Fiscal Year 2019. GAO received and sustained slightly fewer protests than in FY2018, but the overall Effectiveness Rate—i.e., the percentage of time the protester received relief, such as voluntary corrective action or GAO sustaining its protest—held steady at 44%. The most common bases for sustained protests in FY2019 were (1) unreasonable technical evaluations; (2) inadequate documentation of agency records; (3) flawed selection decisions; (4) unequal treatment of offerors; and (5) unreasonable cost or price evaluations.


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Client Alert | 2 min read | 11.14.25

Defining Claim Terms by Implication: Lexicography Lessons from Aortic Innovations LLC v. Edwards Lifesciences Corporation

Claim construction is a key stage of most patent litigations, where the court must decide the meaning of any disputed terms in the patent claims.  Generally, claim terms are given their plain and ordinary meaning except under two circumstances: (1) when the patentee acts as its own lexicographer and sets out a definition for the term; and (2) when the patentee disavows the full scope of the term either in the specification or during prosecution.  Thorner v. Sony Comput. Ent. Am. LLC, 669 F.3d 1362, 1365 (Fed. Cir. 2012).  The Federal Circuit’s recent decision in Aortic Innovations LLC v. Edwards Lifesciences Corp. highlights that patentees can act as their own lexicographers through consistent, interchangeable usage of terms across the specification, effectively defining terms by implication....