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Weeding Out Bad Contractors -- The Government's Push to Enhance its Suspension and Debarment Function

Client Alert | 1 min read | 11.17.11

On November 15, 2011, the head of OMB, Jacob Lew, issued a memorandum requiring the heads of executive departments and agencies to increase management attention on suspension and debarment, consistent with the policies and procedures in the FAR. On the heels of the OMB memorandum, the U.S. Senate's Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs convened hearings on November 16 on "Weeding Out Bad Contractors," which featured testimony from, among others, Daniel Gordon, the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy; David Sims, the Chair of the ISDC; and Steven Shaw, the Air Force’s debarment and suspension official.

For further analysis and links to the OMB Memo and Congressional testimony, click here for a related blog post by Daniel Forman.

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Client Alert | 3 min read | 11.20.25

Design Patent Application Drawings & Prosecution History Must Be Clear (Merely Translucent Won’t Suffice!)

Design patents offer protection for the ornamental appearance of a product, focusing on aspects like its shape and surface decoration, as opposed to the functional aspects protected by utility patents. The scope of a design patent is defined by the drawings and any descriptive language within the patent itself. Recent decisions by the Federal Circuit emphasize the need for clarity in the prosecution history of a design patent in order to preserve desired scope to preserve intentional narrowing (and to avoid unintentional sacrifice of desired claim scope)....